Stop Cleaning
Nobody Notices Anyway
I want to talk about how you can stop cleaning at some point in your life. I would imagine most elderly folk (of which I am one) will stop cleaning somewhere along the line. I’m already having trouble climbing step stools and bending over to pick stuff up off the floor. It seems to take twice as long to get things done now than it did years ago.
I’ve never really been a clean freak. Well, I have to correct that. I was a clean freak for the first few months of our marriage. It got really old, real fast to pick up after my husband after he’d come home from work. You could always tell by the trail of clothes where he was in the house. It would start at the front door where one shoe was kicked one way, and the other shoe was kicked another. I would find them and put them away.
Then, going through the living room, of course there were his socks. Inside out and in little balls, if you weren’t looking for them, they might become cat toys. There go his pants, his shirt and his underwear. That has not changed after 46 years of marriage.
It drove me nuts.
My mother had always kept a beautiful home. She was a stay-at-home mom, and there were five of us kids. She had a lot to do. I remember growing up cleaning on Saturdays. I loved cleaning all her tiny perfume bottles and polishing the mirrored tray that they sat on. I still have one of the bottles my sister sent me after she died. It reminds me of her.
But I came from a clean house. Being a new wife with an untidy (somebody in Spirit just said to me, “You are too kind.”) husband started to get depressing. Being newly married wasn’t supposed to be like that.
So, I became a slob.
It worked. It’s worked since then, too. Becoming a slob saved my marriage.
One of the tricks you do is buy some canned air, the kind you use to blow dust off of electronic stuff like your printer or the inside of your computer and use that to dust. You’d be amazed how much dust canned air can move. By the way, years and years ago we used some canned air to dislodge a spider and her babies that hadn’t yet been born from my computer. Argh. I’d had to take the computer apart because something wasn’t working right. If it was one of the cards that had gotten dislodged, I could fix that. Or, like I said, get rid of the inhabitants in my computer.
The other thing is to buy brown patterned rugs. That helps with coffee spills and other things.
Another thing to do is to periodically have visitors over. Then, you can do what we called company coming cleaning. It’s where you spend five minutes rushing through the house cramming stuff under the bed and into closets. We can’t do that anymore because our closets are full, but there might be room under the mattress.
I’d rather be writing.
Thanks for reading. Go clean something if you want to. Ha, I’m kidding.
