Hello again.

I'm not very good at housework. What I mean is I LIKE a clean house, and I'm very good at cleaning. It's my specialty. And I'm so good at cleaning that it's just completely overwhelming and so it's better not to ever even start . . . unless my mother-in-law is coming. Which she just did come for two weeks and left today. The prep for that, which this time involved painting and moving furniture around (DTD's old room where MIL stays had old, unremovable, I tried, poster tape marks ev-a-ree-where) BESIDES the usual backed up cleaning, lo, these many months (I'm having a dizzy spell just recounting this), plus the two weeks visit, well, let's just say I'm kind of a bad sad camper right now. If anyone can relate to this, then I relate to you, too. But anyway, my friend told me, When you clean, you REALLY CLEAN. I smile. She has a maid come in once a week and claims she has the cleanest dirt in town - it just kind of gets wet and shoved around and then dries in a new spot. That's a scary concept because I would be afraid there's an accumulation factor associated with that method - last week's repositioned dirt, plus this week's brand new dirt, all mingled together. What will that lead to down the road? I want to know. Once when I worked (for one week) at my childhood friend's dentist office, on the application I was asked if I would rather clean my own house or hire a cleaner. Check A. So that is what I am, clean-conscious. And what I am really trying to say is that I am not a very good housekeeper on a regular and consistent basis. If you followed all that . . . excellent.

What I am unequivocally terrible at, besides spelling (yay! for Spellcheck, except it doesn't recognize half of my vocabulary), is ORGANIZING. Organizing, for me, is blood, sweat, tears, no two ways about it, no kidding. I know women who THRIVE on organization. If just kills me. I read where Penélope Cruz claims it's therapeutic for her to clean a closet. I'll be doggoned. Does she mean she thinks organizing is FUN? How do I get to be friends with P Cruz? When we were kids, my mother asked my sister and me to clean the bookcase, you know, organize it, because we had not maintained it properly like good little girls. My dad had built the bookcase by hand, a long and deep thing, it only had two shelves, plus the top, but it took up a good section of a wall and generally sagged in the middle 'cause we had LOTS of books, wonderful, charming children's books, some of them very old. Oh, I can't wait to tell you about some of them sometime. Well, Laura and I had never studied the virtues of placing a book back where it belonged, upright and civil, between the other upright and civil books, like reshelving a library, decently and in order. We just jammed 'em back on the shelf every which-a-way, if that, and soon sloppy horizontal piles formed on the edge, like misshapen growths (because like I said, the bookcase was deep). It was hardly attractive. Pretty soon there were messy stacks of books all over the place, the overflow factor and all that. So, what we did was dump the entire contents of this case, including knick knacks, . . . onto the floor . . . where did ya think? It took about two seconds and instantly changed the landscape of the room, as now we had a mountainous heap, well . . . heaped onto the middle of the pink and white shag rug. Our bedroom was big, my granny had it built over the double car garage when my mother was expecting my sister, who was due exactly on my birth date, except a different year, because we are not twins. Once the bookcase was emptied, wow!, it looked so good, as long as you didn't, you know, look anywhere else. And then . . . we'd walk away. Neither of us had the gumption, the smarts, the desire, the work ethic nor a clue as to how to put it back together - even thought it cramped our stlye as there was no wide open expanse left anymore for executing cartwheels and cheerleading routines. We just took detours around that book mountain until my mother got mad enough, because of course it accumulated additional miscellaneous items of every description and kind of flattened out/morphed into a sort of disheveled mountain range, engulfing the entire space and threatening to make the room unenterable (is that a word?). Gosh, I act like it's the mountain's fault, "it accumulated . . ." Laura and I were just SO wide-eyed and innocent. Really pitiful. And it happened more than once. It happened with closets and drawers and desks, too. What was my mother thinking?? everytime she said, in her soft, fabulous Southern drawl, even though she's from Riverside, California, Now girls, you need to rearrange the books on the bookshelf before we go to swimming pool. So, obviously you have to be born with that tidy gene, and I, most definitely, was not. To clear the semi-innocent, my sister must have had a dormant tidy gene because she's as neat and tidy as can be today. Wow, I feel so left out. But P Cruz could have limitless spectacular therapy sessions helping me get organized. She could start with my music library, um, piles. Yeah.

I realized early on as a newlywed, moving on from childhood orderliness, or rather lack thereof, that I was in serious housekeeping trouble. When it takes you ALL DAY to clear the surfaces so you actually have exposed surfaces to vacuum, dust, mop, well, needless to say, you don't EVER vacuum, dust, mop. I do not know where to put stuff . . . at all. Furthermore, when I was first married, we didn't own a vacuum cleaner. How's that? I was slightly bothered by this equipment vacuum, ha, but carried on somehow. It was an ug-ee little house we had, but one time I was lying on the floor where the kitchen linoleum (which defied hideous, gold and brown nauseating bursting pattern with lots of nooks and crannies, try cleaning those, I did and bleached my brains right out of my head) met the cheapest-of-all-grades mangy pale brown/tan living room matted carpet. All this ug-eeness came with the house, was included in the price, whoo boy. Don't really know why I was lounging right there on the floor, guess I have a thing for floors, but it gave me the chance to study things WAY DOWN LOW, for lack of anything more entertaining to do. We must have lived in the house a good two months by then, and I was truly mortified by what I discovered. HAIR! HAIR! AND MORE HAIR! My mangy low-grade carpet was essentially layered over in masses of tangled hair. Since my hair was about the same color as the carpet, see, and since the hair was all crushed down from walking on it, see, I didn't know this was happening. Whoever said, Blissful ignorance, they had that right. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's loose hair. The line where the carpet and linoleum met highlighted this hair choke for me because the linoleum (isn't that a great word?, I spelled it differently each time, until I checked dictionary, it's way more fun to create a new spelling each time, but I bow to convention) was slightly recessed from the carpet and all the hair just met me straight on at eye level, it kind of suspended itself over the linoleum and was VERY OBVIOUS once I became educated on the subject. Very unnerving experience. I think right after that a Rainbow Vacuum salesperson came to the door and I bought one of those babies immediately on the spot. I was ripe. You know how the Rainbow works. Unlike a normal vacuum cleaner, that has a bag, the Rainbow has a pan of water that traps everything as it's sucked up, like a tornado. And you pay dearly for this astonishing technology, dearly. But I'm sure you comprehendo where I was, as a human being, upon the startling, discomforting revelation of my utter voidness of housekeeping skills, and so I HAD to have a Rainbow - to restore a sense of personal integrity, you know. It was FASCINATING to vacuum my 1,005 sq. ft. house and then get a look at all that filthy, vile, gruesome water, with all the hair and everything else drowning in it, a lovely watery grave. WHERE DOES IT ALL COME FROM??? From my husband and me?? You've got to be kidding me! So, then I had a reward for my effort, a true delight to know how smart I had become, vanquishing hairs and all, which is what I need to remember. I think I fixate on the WORK (and thus drudgery is conceived) and forget the REWARD, which is, drumroll, please, the peace and serenity that ebbs from a sparkly clean house and cloaks the one who dutifully spends all day every day performing housework in a June Cleaver sort of mantle (somehow this seems slightly out of balance, just a tiny bit?). However, that first little house could be cleaned well in two hours. But I was usually going at warp speed because, again, I never cleaned unless company was coming in, say, about two hours, Rainbow or no.

Another oddity was that since I didn't know where or how to begin on the piles, I'd opt to soak a bunch of Q-tips in cleaning solution and climb a ladder and get into some groovy detail work. Stuff like that. My family would look at me like I was half-crazed, who me?, and cautiously propose the questions, Do you suppose the guests are going to notice the molding is shining, when they're tripping over all the hazardous junk laying around? When they have to resort to scraping a variety of trash off the sofa to find a seat? Well . . . they MGHT notice. I think I did those kinds of things out of desperation, a murky, mind-numbing desperation (time management?, never heard of it). I mean, who hasn't been gripped by the terror of procrastination now and again? Q-tips at least felt empowering.

So, cleaning, or the prospect of it, still gets me down. I have no system, though in my twenties my friends and I researched systems and cooked up systems and typed up systems and then worked the systems . . . for one week . . . maybe. You've all heard of the 15 minutes a day. Yeah, well . . . Or the chore card rotation system. Yeah, well . . . My own invention was to clean one wall a day, whatever was on that wall, be it blinds, furniture, baseboards, floors, junk, etc. Apparently that idea was good in theory only, as I have yet to try it. It sounds overly ambitious anyway. My other system I invented was to get rid of everything I own. How hard can it be to organize and clean absolutely nothing? Well, no one ever accused me of being practical. My grandmother was practical, though. A polyester granny dress hastily donned, as likely on backwards as not, one dunk of the powder puff in Coty's Airspun powder followed by one hasty plunk of it on the nose and she was good to go. She preached, whatever else we did, NOT TO RUIN OUR LIFE WITH A LOT OF STUFF!!!! She was the original minimalist and was famous for scurrying lickety-split through her housework so she could get out with her friends and really live. I just sit and stew. I'll tell you about my problem piles in another post, I'm sure it will make you feel so good.

But all this to get to the main point: LIVING DUST. It's what you and I are, actually. Since I'm typing (or was) and you're reading (I hope), I'll assume we're living. I know it's not safe to assume much, but . . . anyway. And really, we ARE a heap of dust, that's what God made us from, the dirt of the earth. So, there you have it, Living Dust. When we die, our bodies go back to ordinary dust. WOW, God is amazing. I mean, I never would have picked dust to form us, would you? Dust must have lots of wonderful properties - of course the hand of God touching it, that imparts everything. But this "revelation" has helped me, somewhat, with my attitude towards dust. I AM DUST. Therefore, why should I get seriously disturbed (in a wad) every time I see dust on the piano? If you dust that piano, I can guarantee that the flecks and specks will be back before your rag makes the final, questionably triumphant sweep. It is truly a hopeless endeavor. The ONLY dust-free house I ever visited was in Rome, Georgia. It was a giant old Southern type enormous fabulous house, with 20 foot ceilings, so it seemed. The conversation was lost on me because I happened to notice there was no dust on the table next to my chair. I wasn't looking for dust, that would be naughty, but the ABSENCE of it jumped out and boinged me on the forehead. So, I started discreetly glancing about and still there was no dust detectable to the naked eye. Then it became a game, I was going to find a particle of dust if it killed me. But there wasn't any . . . so it killed me. I credit this phenomenon to a lack of central AC in that house. That's why the modern housewife has the dust dilemma, her dirty old air ducts spewing dingy, dusty, moldy air non-stop. Not to mention I just read that every human sheds 40,000 dead cells every minute or so. Well, something like that. It's a REAL problem, but dust no longer "gets" to me as much, since I realize I'm nothing but dust anyway. Well, dust and a soul. And a spirit.

DTD shot in for a second today, to throw in some laundry. That's what she does at my house, laundry, watch recorded TV shows and print out school papers. Turns out she's a very talented writer, which I must tell you about one day, it's a fun story how it came to light. Anyway, I told DTD, that at my birthday dinner someone made a speech about their bun being cold (hamburger bun). DTD said I'm going to be just like that, complaining when I'm not happy about something. I said, I am? She said, You already are. I said, REALLY? Are you? NO!, DTD declares, never! Okay, I couldn't argue with that. I'm past arguing anyway, it's the patience thing kicking in. Then she was gone. I get to transfer her laundry from washer to dryer, hang the delicates and fold and bag, but don't I dare wash her clothes. That's the unpardonable sin.

I almost didn't write on my blog today because I have a migraine. But I didn't want to fail at my project on the very second day, like my housekeeping systems outlined above.

'Til tomorrow, enjoy your dust,
KEM

Living Dust and Other Quirky Stuff

Today was my Big One . . . before THE BIG ONE. You know, the birthday ending in "9" before the birthday ending in "0". This is cause for pause - don't want to be semi-conscious when THE milestone rolls around in exactly 12 months and miss it in one silly fell swoop or something. So, in preparation for this coming, momentous and fairly dreaded event, I want to mark each day in the next year, by way of a sort of little exercise in cementing the stuff I want to preserve for my teenage daughter. I want to accomplish something. I want to try personal discipline. Yeah, that's right, I'm going to start blogging. If I blog every day, how can I possibly be comatose when THE BIG DAY arrives? Then again, I might be bargaining for too much. Wait until my daughter gets a load of this. Right now, of course, teenage daughter LABORS at tolerating me even just a speck. And I give her credit for her labor. Her artsy handmade birthday card asked, How does it feel to be __9? Next year I can officially make fun of you for being old! YAY!! :) Just kidding, she offers. Life is more or less composed of patience, isn't it? I mean, when you've (I've) lived so many (enough) years, it helps to think maybe something has counted for something? Just a tiny little bit of nothing something, please? Say 'tis so. And maybe one day this child will absorb a slim eentsy (my husband's spelling) dot of my valuable, surely, if modest, life experience?? Oh, and then I get to wait around for ?? years for her to possibly one day give me permission to be myself around her, sans her clearly audible sarcastic observations for everything I am/say/do? And maybe, if I'm really lucky, she will move me one notch lower on the Freak Scale? This will be BIG, trust me. Well, patience has become the name of my game.

The fun thing is that my wonderful friend gave me a book for my birthday on detoxifying the body. When DTD (Darling Teenage Daughter) took me to lunch, her treat, I said, Just think, in another 10 years or so, you will be as old as I was when I had you. I found that a very profound and comfortable thought and sat there with a smug smirk, I can dish it out a little, too. Not one to not have the last word, she, who never misses a beat, said, Maybe I will speed things along and get married soon and have children 10 years younger than when you did. So my little secret weapon is this detox book. I'm going to inform DTD that when I operate by the principles set forth in this book, my age will start reversing, but her age will still be advancing, so in about 15 years we will have become the same age, meeting in the middle and all that good stuff. That ought to throw her for a jolly good loop.

DTD is of a very generous nature, whether it's to hurl insults (I told her she needs to become a teenage satirist, a newspaper columnist or something) or buy gifts. She gave me Estée Lauder mascara, which I requested when she texted me, What do you want for your birthday? (I am not shy about getting what I want for my birthday, she told me today she knows NO ONE who loves a birthday more than I - sorry, can't help it, once every 365 days, I'm gonna make the most of it.) I know everyone loves Lancôme or the drug store one with hot pink tube and florescent green wand, but I like to be different. At any rate, I can now ditch my dried out $3 VS mascara bought on a whim (because, after all, who is going to pass up a deal like that?), that leaves less-than-lovely clumps on my lashes and makes them look like roach legs. That was an original comment made to me by my boarding school roommate umpteen million years ago, when she stared down my eyelashaes in math class one day. She pronounced, evil-like, Your eyelashes look like roach legs. Then she laughed a wicked little witch laugh. And I haven't quite forgotten it. And it's true. If you're lucky enough to live in Florida, you know roach legs have these horrible little sort of fluffy, sticky feelers attached to them, and they do look exactly like a bad mascara job. If it happens to you, you (and everyone besides) will be running for your life.

After lunch DTD surprised me by wanting to go to the health food store - a voluntary first, going with me, that is. She is on a major health kick to find a solution for a bothersome little allergy she has. I said, How about it! You actually have incorporated something I've tried to teach you over, lo, these multitudinous years - healthful eating! She said, No, what you gave me was poor health. But the real reason she wanted to go the health store, I deduced, was that the last time she was in there (yesterday?) some male clerk who assisted her told her he was a photographer and wanted to photograph her eyes. Oh, goody. Nevertheless, I learned that there is a vast arsenal of gluten-free, wheat-free, dairy-free and, basically, it would seem, food-free, products of which I was previously, blissfully, and wishing I remained so, ignorant. The packages are boldly labeled, listing their virtues, and now I'm sure that's all I'll see when I shop there. They'll jump out and scare me and get me! Of course, switching to the health diet is going to put DTD in the Poor House. Rice milk or corn spaghettie is easily double the price of good old-fashioned, sensible dairy and wheat. But, hey, she lives on her own, works and goes to college. She's one sassy, cool kid, AND I LOVE HER!!

You know what? I have to close this out NOW because I have a great talent for breathing on the wrong key and making it all (everything on the screen) vanish . . . just like that! (snap of the fingers!) . . . unforgivably (is that a word?) . . . FOREVER! It almost just happened. That would be a sad sorry start to the blog, to say the very least.

Tomorrow . . . What is Living Dust, anyway?

Thanks for reading,
KEM