I was just vacuuming the kitchen, you know, digging into the trim along the floor underneath the sink, a place that never seems to get totally clean. I got all the vaccumable stuff, but still. My inner goldbrick spoke up, “Aw, that’s good enough. Consider the dirt a sign of life ongoing.” Then I thought back to how perfectly immaculate my childhood house was. What did that signify? I also thought of how some of my mom’s ashes wound up in a vacuum cleaner.
We Try. Sort of.
Our family today tries to follow an alternating weekend house-cleaning schedule. We blow it off fairly regularly. (I think I missed my last shower-cleaning shift. Just saying.) Doc devised the rotation out of frustration that we’d otherwise clean precisely as often as we expected company, which is almost never. Two or three cleanups a year is normal, right?
Anyhow, Doc and I hail from separate cleaning religions anyway: I’m a Tidier, she’s a Cleaner. I’ll be bothered by clutter but allow my neatly piled stuff to accumulate as much dust as it wants. Her possessions, looking fresh from a tornado, are pretty much hospital-clean. If we could get it together we’d equal one functioning adult.
But What Was That All About?
I’m now wondering why it was that my childhood home was always so impeccably kept. I bought into the aesthetic at the time, even sliding under my blankets and sheets at night without untucking them. I didn’t want to have to make my bed in the morning at such an advanced level.
Why did my mother care so much? Was it a result of society’s expectations of a young housewife in the 1950s and 1960s? She didn’t wear pearls or anything, like Beaver Cleaver’s Mom, but, hey, see The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Was Mom spending her life in fear of her parents’ judgment? (Partial spoiler: Yes, even after they were gone.)
Or was Mom attempting to hold the line on untidy reality by constructing her own oasis in an entropic world? Did she find comfort in all that perfection? This was a woman, after all, who’d tidy up before her “cleaning lady” arrived.
As in life…
Flash-forward to when I wound up with her ashes. I had no idea what to do with them/her. Her only guidance had been to “just stand me out with the trash,” useless advice, really, for a plastic bag full of cremains. I kept her in my living room closet until I could figure out what to do.
A few months later, Doc and I met. Early on, I sheepishly brought up the topic of the Mom in the Closet. I asked if Doc wanted to see her, and I guess she didn’t say “no” because I brought them out. (Who knows what the poor woman was thinking.) As I placed Mom’s bag on my desk, I noticed it had sprung a leak, and bits of my mother were on the living room floor. (I do not take this as a comment from my mother regarding Doc, just in case you swing that way.)
I was stunned, but I knew what to do: Mom had recommended I get an “electrikbroom,” and now I had the perfect use for it.
On one hand, I was freaked out at what I was sucking up into the thing. At the same time, I couldn’t help but be struck by the rightness of (at least some of) Mom winding up in a vacuum. Was this where her soul really longed to be anyway?
Nope. At least I hope not. Doc and I soon came up with the idea of scattering the rest of Mom’s ashes in Quebec where my parents had honeymooned when their lives were full of promise and life’s complications hadn’t yet entered the picture. We cast her into the breeze off of Île d’Orléans, or at least those parts of my mother that didn’t blow back on us. Jeez, Mom. For all the talk you hear of ashes being scattered, no one talks about the stupid wind.
Ile d’Orleans
Anyhow, all this has me thinking that it’s good to clean, but only up to the point of keeping a functionally tidy and sanitary living space for the fam. Stains and other assorted bits of damage need not be seen as flaws: They’re a home’s scars and represent the living that’s happened here. And maybe someday I’ll even be able to feel the same pride and affection for them that I feel for my own.
We do have to do something about the rugs.
