Housework requires a
jump-start at times, for instance in the dead of winter when productivity can
seem impossible. My friend Betty K. had a four-season excuse for household tasks
she didn’t want to do: “Who sees it?”
People do see dirty
carpeting; just watch HGTV. No House Hunter lets a square foot escape a snide
remark. So, when my brother offered to shampoo my carpets while I was on a trip,
he didn’t have to ask twice. In my absence Joe was able to work at his own pace
undisturbed, and the carpets had time to dry--undisturbed.
Joe repeated his offer
a few months ago, with the difference that this time the job would be easier,
just a touch-up. Most of my carpeting had remained pristine through the
holidays and even during the harshness of January.
“Even with all the company you had?” Joe joked. I rarely host anything.
After I’d fortified him
with a cup of coffee, he readied his cleaning equipment. “Let’s make this as
easy as possible, I said. “You don’t need to do everything. Let me show you my
path.”
“You don’t need to. It’s
a shining beacon.”
I walk most often on
the carpeted areas between the kitchen and my office, bedroom, and bathroom. If
anybody wanted to trace my daily movements, it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes.
Joe started in the hall
between the bedroom and master bath. Off that hall was my walk-in closet. I
didn’t want him to overdo it, so I said, “You don’t have to do the entire
closet. Just go down the middle, where I tend to stand. It smells like feet.”
“Have you considered slippers?”
I tried to stay out of
the way, but it wasn’t long before I had to peek. “This is what killed me the
last time,” Joe said as I rounded the corner and stifled a scream. The section
he had cleaned looked like “attack of the black spiders.” The wet carpet was dotted
with dark shapes the size of quarters that seemed to be advancing.
“That’s what the
shampooer pulled out of your carpet. It’s dirt,” he said. I was glad to know
that instead of an army of evil arachnids, I was looking at wet dust bunnies. “When
I did your floors the first time,” Joe said, “it took me an hour just to pick them
up.”
“Skip the stairs this
time,” I said a few minutes later in spite of the trail of coffee stains
leading up the steps to my office. “Maybe you could just shampoo the landing.”
“I can’t stop now,” Joe
said. “Now that I’ve seen it, I have to clean it. Do you use a pogo stick when
you carry your coffee upstairs?”
When he was done, he
called me into the bathroom to see the murky water he was about to discard. It reminded
me of the chemical spill that polluted the Elk River in West Virginia in
January 2014.
“When I was still
working as a school custodian,” he said, “I always showed the teacher the dirty
water afterward. ‘What does it look like?’ I would ask, and they knew I wanted
them to compare it to coffee: was it black or “with cream”?
He didn’t ask me, but “black
with spiders” is what came to mind for the water. The carpet was pure cream.
