saturday cleaning

My mom's a domestic goddess. In our house, everything was always clean, and everything had its place. My dad was in the military-- where order goes, they were a match made in heaven. When my brother and I would complain about having to remake our beds (a rushed job wasn't good enough for mom), he'd tell us stories about boot camp and ROTC and having to make beds you could bounce a quarter off of. I've never been able to get this to work-- but maybe it has something to do with how I'm throwing the quarter.

One of mom's traditions is a weekly cleaning day. In high school, Thursday was the special day. We'd come home from school and swim practices to dust rags and vacuum cleaners. The house was always so spotless, many times I wasn't even sure what I was cleaning. I couldn't see the dust I was supposed to be wiping off, but Mom could, so I wiped, wiped, wiped. My brother did the vacuuming on account of him being less likely to bang vaccuum into wall and leave marks. (I'm still a bit clumsy that way.)

As much as I loathed weekly cleaning days growing up, and the daily maintenence required to keep the folks happy (daily bed making and room tidying, not being allowed to leave my books and papers spread out over the floor), now that I'm on my own I really marvel at how well they were able to keep things together. I'm convinced that my house will never look as clean and sparkling as theirs does, no matter how hard I try.

Though at the time it could feel oppressive, there was and is still something very calming about walking into and moving and living inside of a clean house. There's a part of me that sighs with joy everytime I walk into their pristine house... and there's another part that feels a bit uncomfy after I've been there too long.

but to the point: Ever since we moved in together, it seems, P. and I have been saying "we really should set aside one day a week to clean the house." We say this everytime the house gets sooooo dirty/disorganized/oppressive that neither one of us can stand it and one or the other or both of us break down and spend hours grumpily cleaning as much as we can. Today felt different. We got up in the morning, did the laundry, P. cleaned the kitchen while I reorganized the disaster the bedroom had become and picked up in the living room, and unloaded the dishwasher, then we worked on the bathroom together. And the strangest thing happened: we had the nicest time doing it. We were nesting. And the feeling of having accomplished all of this lingers. I can breathe again.

I would say "mom would be proud,"and I guess that's true, but at the same time I'm feeling guilty about all the cleaning projects we didn't get to: both offices are a mess, the carpet could use a good cleaning, the kitchen floor could be mopped, the laundry and storage rooms tidied, and the shower could be scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed some more. Our landlord left it looking pretty icky when we moved in; I've tried cleaning it many times and still can't get all the mildew to go away. If any of you cleaning gurus happen to be reading this, I could use some suggestions about how to deal with this one...

We're hoping we can keep neat all the rooms we worked on today and get back to these other projects... maybe next Saturday.