By ANGELA MASTERSON JONES
Published October 12, 2003
For Sale by Owner declares the sign that appeared this morning on the lawn three houses down, like a vagrant lurking. We've known for years the family who built and lives in this house. We've partied at their poolside, vacationed with them in the Keys, and watched when as a young couple they brought home their new baby girl. It's a hard slap of reality to think of them not only moving away, but moving apart. This red-and-white plastic sign is their way of publicly admitting that their amicably discreet separation while under one roof has advanced, or degraded, to divorce. A murky grief makes me want to clean.
I know where dust gathers in my house. A hot spot is in the living room under the stairs, where my teenage daughter's toys have become decor: her crystal chess set, her child-size rocking chair handed down by my father, and her other grandfather's electronic keyboard with dead keys booby-trapping live ones.
"It's an eyesore," my husband of 18 years complained recently. "The first thing you see when you walk in the door is stuff. We should make it a nice sitting area, something inviting." I envision two plump upholstered chairs bookending a low table. He brings home pictures of hardwood, ladder-backed settees he photographed in Costa Rica. When we have the money we'll decide. Of course, we'd have the money if he didn't fly off with his buddies to surf in Costa Rica every year.
I duck into the corner under the stairs, tracing the sweeper nozzle's brush attachment along the curve of our daughter's treasure-chest lid, sifting away weeks of flaking skin and interior paint, and what walks in with us on our clothes. Inside this dark floral wooden chest with a brass clasp lies years of booty from the annual Rubonia Mardi Gras parades - lustrous beads in every hue and molding, prizes caught simply by reaching out and smiling.
I reach out my sweeper hose now to whisk dust and fur into the canister. Filth is evident; I wave my aluminum wand - swoosh! - and filth's gone, sometimes without even touching, just by brushing the air above. Immaculate reception.
But then there is the encrusted or clinging. Clumps of chocolate or sticky goo that defy the horsehaired periscope, broad brush attachments or motorized head. I have to get down and dirty, surrendering from my standard bend-at-the-back stance to a full-fledged squat, scraping the bare metal nozzle against our hardwood floor over and over to remove what I don't want to know, don't want to touch with my hand.
Cat hair on the carpet upstairs is a different story. Even the elemental scraping wand is useless against fur matted through daily feline napping in a patch of sun behind our bedroom's vertical blinds. Only sweaty fingers will free this pelt, raked and coiled into a ball for final suction. Scaredy-cat would be proud if she'd ever stick around to watch the fat balls I make of her fur. If I could force her to stay in the room with the sweeper, though, it would make more sense to simply vacuum her. But across the honey-oak hardwood floors downstairs, her gray wispy hair becomes tumbleweed corraled in corners, lassoing legs of barstools and tables. I know where they gather, and the ease with which I dispatch them gives me power.
We could afford the monthly fee of a cleaning service, and my antipathy for scrubbing bathrooms sometimes makes me consider a quick stroll through the Yellow Pages, but the thought of opening my house to hired hands disturbs me. I like knowing my family's stains, where crumbs congregate, and finding our patterns. In the family room now, I poke the crevice attachment under my husband's love seat and hear clattering up the pipe the sharp clicks of fingernails he chewed off last week while watching TV. Some patterns aren't worth scrutinizing.
When I was a kid, the scratchy gold carpet in the hallway of our small Hoosier house was thinning down the middle, so Dad asked Mom, my sister and me to hug the wall when we walked the hall to wear the carpet evenly. It was fun at first, tightrope-walking the periphery, but our mission was doomed. When the novelty wore off, we drifted back to our centered course, and Dad never did replace the carpet. He replaced the house.
You shape a home with your living as surely as a home shapes your life. Ten years ago, my husband and I designed, then built the stilt house we live in now in Florida, with bamboo shoots ruffling a high octagonal window and terns wheeling outside sliding-glass doors to blue sky. He didn't get down on one knee to ask for my hand in marriage, but nine years later he knelt to nail the tongue-and-groove lumber of our hardwood floor. With multiple sandings, we both stained and varnished the floor to a semigloss finish. There's a place where a blond hair from his mustache is captured in the varnish like a prehistoric insect in amber.
The same honey luster glows beneath my rag as I dust the pine banister leading up to our bedroom. Every inch of this wood and all the doors and trim in the house were finished with a brush in the stroke of our hands. Now I go over some of it again with a torn patch from his old T-shirt and spritzes of Pledge, rising one stair at a time, polishing and remembering.
If every stair treaded adds a day to a life, I will live a century with firm calves walking down and down, then up and up, from bedroom to living area, to the world, and back again. I hope I'll always manage to sweep my own dust until I become it, because whenever I devote time to keeping house, I realize all I have to keep.
- Angela Masterson Jones lives, writes and cleans in Terra Ceia.
