I Dream of Cleaning

I pull the Vanbulance into the park-n-ride next to Diane Thursday morning. “Where’s Laural?” I ask. Diane shrugs, and I immediately plunk my head on the steering wheel. “Oh, shit.” I was supposed to have picked Laural up on the way to the carpool, but in the whirlwind of planning my ensemble for the Bellingham Wig-Out, the Ski-to-Sea Race, and the flurry of pre-dawn cleaning I’ve been doing around The Product That Is My Home, I somehow forgot.

The backstory? One of my real estate agents (not the one I used to be married to) called yesterday. “The walk-through went great!” He told me. “The other brokers liked the place. There was no detectable cat smell.” “That’s good,” I replied. “You might want to double-check the kitchen, though,” he continued. “There was a smear on the front of the dishwasher.”

Hence my increasingly vigilant morning routine: arise, greet the day, stumble from bed, do bathroomy-stuff, sanitize toilet, make coffee, sanitize sink, make toast, sanitize countertop, shower, sanitize shower stall, get dressed, make bed, arrange throw pillows, sanitize cat box. It’s something of a miracle that I have the energy and time to even go to my job. Not to mention the fact that Clorox Super-Shine Bleach Formula Spray has eaten a hole in my cerebral cortex, apparently in the picking-up-a-friend-for-work lobe.

The morning of the forgotten Laural, I attended to my usual array of OCD-inspired bleaching and then stepped in something squishy that had once been in my cat’s belly, so I had to scrape that off the carpet. Makers of Friskies must be in collusion with manufacturers of carpet cleaner. [Mr. Burns voice] “You guys dye the cat food bright orange! And we’ll cut you in on our profits on Extra Strength Cat Barf Removal Spray!” [Cackling, rubbing of palms.]

Stinky and I were kicked out of the super-sanitized and de-barfed condo on Saturday while an open house was held, so the cat sat in the Vanbulance while I tackled another cleaning project: removing the remains of the shed from my lot. Although I invited everyone I know, the only person there for most of the day was the one who was paid to be there: my builder, James Bradbury. My mom stopped by with a baggie of fresh cookies and Charlie arrived in time for me to attend to my responsibilities as the captain of the 2nd place Women’s Recreational Ski to Sea Team, Kiss My Tiara.

As we hauled what amounted to 3,362 pounds of boards and crumbling tarpaper, James and I had plenty of time to discuss important building-related issues, including, but not limited to 1) the genius that is the magnet sweeper; 2) his heroic act as a ten-year-old involving a drill, a garage, and his father’s jagged tooth, and 3) writing as therapy.

Evie may be howling twenty hours a day as her tiny teeth wiggle their way through her gums, and I may be tapping my feet, eager to move my purple reading chair into the study that exists only in the invisible void between paper, brain, and twenty feet of air above 17th Street, but we are both processing the torture and the tedium through writing. Yes, teething sucks. Yes, building a house involves a lot of waiting. But much is relieved when we look for the humorous, the unusual, and the fascinating to report upon.

Words are calming. For James and Jennifer, they penetrate the shrieking of a teething baby. For me, they soothe the anxious foot-tapping. They give us all a direction for our energy and our angst. I consume myself seeking them out and arranging them, sweeping up those that clutter my peace and using the others to build a quiet home for my thoughts and a solid shelter against worry.