Sweeping clean

It’s funny how the same joke seems as funny the millionth time around as it does the first. One of father’s favourites is about brooms – and it never fails to make me giggle. Whenever I am seen wandering about the house with a broom (either on my never-ending quest for brushing out spiderwebs or sweeping cat litter out of my bathroom where Small Cat has her…umm…facilities), he will ask me with a tiny smile lighting up his eyes, “You going somewhere?”. And when I mumble irritably about needing new brooms, he will say with a delightful solemnity, “You just got a new car!”.

Sigh.

Keeping a house clean, even a decent-sized apartment, is not easy. The process starts when I wake up and ends only when I lie down at night, sometimes hopping out of bed again because I have forgotten to make sure there is detergent in the washing machine or I need to be sure that the towel on the spare bathroom door has not fallen off its hook. It is almost borderline obsessive compulsive, though my doctor assures me that I am just the compulsive allergic-personality type who stresses if something is not just-so and comes out in a rash if I do not do something about making it that way. Whatever the case, these days I make sure that things are basically just-so and let the rest go until another day when I am more in the mood to be persnickety about it all.

So, as I was saying, the cleaning thing – it starts early. I roll out of bed and wander blearily around dealing with everything from making green tea for myself to – for some reason I can only ascribe to that aforementioned borderline…- pushing the sugar container back on the shelf to line up with the other boxes. From then on, it is a matter of keeping one ear on our rather temperamental and admittedly ageing washing machine, making sure that everything is in place for the maid when she storms into the house to start her job by throwing dishes in and out of the sink – it’s called ‘washing up’, though I would do it myself in a rather more gentle and silent manner, but each to her own – and getting myself ready to head out to work.

Of course, both Father and Small Cat have their contributions to make that are greatly appreciated. Father has his set of self-designated chores, while Small Cat takes her morning task of singing high opera to wake me up very seriously indeed. She also helps clean house by pushing all the feathers that she plays with under the carpets and keeps a stern eye on the maid as she blows through the bedrooms with her broom and swabbing cloth and bucket. And I trot dutifully behind, switching off lights, switching on fans and switching direction as the maid does an occasional unexpected turnaround to redo a spot she thinks I have just left a nasty footprint on.

Then comes the dusting. It is a job that has been traditionally assigned to me, as daughter of the house and youngest member of the family, and I have always hated it, never mind that it was made mine to make sure that I understood the value of the pocket-money I ‘earned’ by doing it. Now I pay the maid to do it, with the money that I earn by working at my job in the newspaper! As long as it helps me/us keep the house clean and gets the essentials done without too much damage to self or property, it cannot hurt, right?

And just for the record, this morning I went broom shopping. In the new car.