| 2:23p |
Housewife's lament.....
I spent all day yesterday cleaning this house, and will spend almost all of today that way as well, and then tomorrow -- I hope -- I'll finally get through cleaning this house. At which point I plan to bronze the whole thing, so that it will still be clean when my family arrives on Christmas Day.
There's a little book by Kathleen Norris that I read over and over again, called The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work". All about housework and caregiving and poem-making. On pp. 26-27 Norris asks: "Is it not a good joke that when God gave us work to do as punishment for our disobedience in Eden, it was work that can never be finished, but only repeated, day in and day out, season upon season, year after year?" And on page 35 she says: "Whenever I am checking bags at an airport, I recall St. Teresa of Avila's wonderful prayer of praise, 'Thank God for the things I do not own.' " What she said; second the motion.
However, back at the ranch ..... Things had gotten so disorderly in our crowded and dilapidated dwelling that I was beginning to be afraid that some official empowered by the Patriot Act would come and take my husband away to foster care. This happened for three reasons: (1) I am elderly enough that I can't get things done as quickly as I used to, nor can I keep at them for as long as I used to; (2) from late July until mid-December I was tied up in knots with that consulting contract I've mentioned before, in which every single item was an Emergency Rush Project; and (3) I live in an underground house.
If you'd asked me, in the days when I lived up on top of the ground, I'd have suggested that an underground house would be much easier to keep clean than the standard kind. I was wrong. An underground house has many many advantages, and I'm grateful to be living in one. It costs almost nothing either to cool or to heat, it provides privacy and quiet [I'll come back to the Underground Mystery Noises another time]; and when the weather radio tells you to take cover, you don't have to go anywhere. However, keeping it clean is an undertaking the majorness of which is difficult to describe.
There's the dust, for starters. How dust can get into a house with only one window -- right at the front of the house, by the front door -- is beyond me. But if I dust something, turn my back on it, and then look again, it will be dusty. It's not that I don't know how to dust; I do. I've been dusting for more than sixty years, and I'm good at it. But dust materializes in this house. It manifests itself. It is the bane of my domestic existence. There are other people who, in domestic terms, have Real Problems; I know that, and am aware that dust is trivial. But I do hate that dust.
Worst of all, there's the mildew. The mildew has won, no question about it, and all I can do is make ceremonial gestures at it. Everything that you can use to remove mildew, everything that's suitable for the physical strength available to me personally now, has toxic fumes with it. In the summertime, that's okay; you open the front door [I don't have a back door] and you turn on all the fans, and the fumes leave the house in a hurry. Plus, when the air conditioning is running (now and then) it does cut down on the mildew. But in the wintertime, Mildew Rules. You can't open the house, which means you can't use the mildew-killers, and you sure can't run the air conditioning. When I was younger I just got in there and scrubbed the cursed stuff off the walls by brute force; now that I'm an old woman, brute force is no longer one of my talents.
As for the substance that results when mildew and dust combine.... you don't want to know.
Newer underground houses are built differently, and don't have these problems. But when we built this one twenty-six years ago nobody knew much about building underground houses, and -- as our fearless leader puts it -- mistakes were made. That the house exists at all is amazing, since the building crews hit solid rock about three feet down on the site my husband had chosen for it and told him he'd have to give up and build on top of the ground. Instead, he set explosives on squares and blew a house-sized hole in the solid rock to put it in, and that solved the problem.
It's a wonderful house, and I'm grateful for it. And now I have to go clean it some more...... |