My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #41, May 23, 1997

PATRON SAINT OF DUSTBUNNIES

Every Spring I throw my annual party in honor of St. Gildas, patron saint of idiots, much revered in my household. This means I get to spend the week beforehand in a frenzy of cleaning and dusting and throwing away the accumulations of the past year, so I guess for me this makes him patron saint of housework, too. You see, housekeeping is one of those things I know how to do, without spending a whole lot of time practicing it, so I need to throw a party periodically to keep my house from lapsing into graduate-student squalor.

Not frat-house squalor, mind you. I do throw out my pizza boxes, and do the dishes every day and clean the bathroom fixtures. I sweep the floors and mop them. True, I wouldn't advise you to eat off them, but given the fact that we have dishes and a kitchen table. that would be kind of a silly thing to do anyway. I do know how to scrub, even if it's not the way I prefer to spend my days. In the words of a 15 year old girl, "I try to live each day as if it was my last. Which is why I don't have any clean clothes, because if this was the last day of your life, would YOU spend it doing laundry?"

For me, well, an awful lot of my life is spent at work. Home is where I park my books and CDs and computer. It's where I listen to music and knit and think. It's where I read and think. It's where I pet cats and think. It's where I bake bread and think, and make soups and pot roasts and think. It's a place to be comfortable in, not a place to pay attention to unless I have to. One of the ways I got through twenty years of working full time while raising a son and still having some time for myself was by not noticing a whole lot of details. Like dust. Or any cobwebs higher up than six feet. Or assorted piles of mail and books and magazines.

This was especially difficult when I had my son's mysterious stacks of stuff as well as my own. I could at least sort through my own piles, and throw away the junk mail and catalogs and TV Guides for weeks long since over and done with. But with visions in my head of all those mothers who've thrown away priceless baseball cards and first ever issues of Mad Magazine, I have never done much with his stuff except remove it to his room and arrange it in symmetrical stacks.

Now, however, he's out of the house. Not all his stuff, yet, mind you, but at least he is. That means that HIS mysterious junkpiles have stopped growing. Miracles do happen, even in this day and age.

So, this time around, I have been ruthless. I put all my fan mail (thank you, I read it and keep it and answer it) in file folders. I sorted through my closets and disposed of all those clothes that only in my dreams will I ever fit into again. I went through random boxes, unearthing strange odds and ends I haven't looked at for years, like my notes from library school. Since I have been selecting books for twenty years now, I finally decided it was safe to throw out my notes on how to select library materials.

My last doddering old cat has died, so, much as I miss her company, I went through the house removing every last bit of embedded cat hair from my rugs and upholstery and draperies. My allergic friends now have a narrow window of opportunity to visit me and not break out in hives before I acquire my next set of kittens.

I cleaned all the weeds and leaves out of the garden, and hosed off the dirt that has blown against the sides of the house. I washed windows and at least briefly contemplated the possibility of scrubbing the baseboards. Which reminds me...

True story: shortly before my son was born, knowing that my mother would visit and help me take care of my baby for a while, I spent my time after work housecleaning so she wouldn't be too horrified. By my admittedly degraded standards, my house was beautiful. My mother arrived and immediately started scrubbing baseboards and washing windows. She put wax on my floors (which went, and I quote, "Slurp"-- they had not previously known what wax was). I told her somewhat defensively that I had in fact been cleaning like crazy and she said, "That's all right, hon, I know you don't have time to do the little things. It's something I can do for you because I don't have anything else to do." Do you wonder that I adored this woman?

Now, in me, the talent for homemaking comes out more in cooking and baking than in cleaning. But when it is time to throw a party or entertain a mother-in-law or get a rent deposit back, the spirit of my nasty clean grandmother enters into me. And this is a woman who...well, I'll have to tell you a little story.

She and my folks were living in Cincinnati when the great flood of 1937 happened. The water was unsafe to drink, so each family was allotted two buckets of treated water per day, which you had to walk downtown to collect--none of the streetcars were working. My folks lived on Price Hill, at one end of Cincinnati, and my mother's parents lived on College Hill, at the opposite end. My dad walked all the way downtown and all the way back up Price Hill with our two buckets. Then he trudged back downtown to get the water for my grandparents. When he arrived, panting, with their two buckets, at their house on College Hill, he saw that she was sick and called a doctor for her (doctors made housecalls in those days). Before he realized what she was doing, my grandmother had gotten out of bed, taken one of those buckets of water, and poured detergent into it so she could scrub the floors because the doctor was coming.

My father was a mild mannered man, but he had to be forcibly restrained from strangling her.

Now, I've got her genes, and I can do nasty clean when I have to. I may not ever whitewash any cockroaches that survive a ruthless campaign of eradication (a long grandpa story), but when I set myself a deadline--a mother-in-law or a landlord visiting, or a party--I'm GOOD. I can have the entire house look like my grandmother lives here.

Don't get me wrong, here--the point of the party IS to have fun with my friends. Given what St. Gildas is in charge of, we gather for a little inspired lunacy of our own, good friends, good food and drink (and the leftovers are wonderful). But if it keeps me honest, and keeps the junk from piling up to the ceiling, so much the better.

In fact, every time I read one of those newspaper stories about little old ladies found lying dead in apartments so filled with junk that they had to make little burrowing tunnels to get to the bathroom, I start looking nervously around my house and thinking that now just might be a splendid time to have another party.

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