I've never been much for cleaning and by that I mean I despise it. I don't dislike cleaning a little bit, I will do almost ANYTHING to avoid it. I wasn't brought up that way.
My mother is a clean fiend. Growing up, I suffered under her clean regime. Every Saturday, she'd rise with the sun, rev up with a few cups of coffee and then break out the cleaning products. She'd scrub that house from top to bottom and vacuum every crevice. My job, when I wasn't trying to get out of it, was to dust the formal living room, the dining room and the family room, scour the bath tub, load the dishwasher and maybe fold a few towels. I could make those jobs last ALL day because I was SO convinced that I would die at any moment from the Pledge fumes. The formal living room took me hours to dust and I think there were two end tables and the fireplace mantle that needed dusting...but it took me a long time to get past popping the wax bubbles in the turtle candle that was on the bottom shelf of one of those end tables. Mom would go whizzing by with the vacuum cleaner...then back the other way with a bucket of soapy water...then back the other way with a basket of clothes. The whole while, I'd be dusting the same end table and while she was frantically vacuuming the stairs, I'd make a few more big holes in the turtle candle. I drove her insane.
Sometimes I'd be absolved from my cleaning duties and that's usually when BRIDGE CLUB was coming over that Saturday. NO ONE but mom cleaned when the bridge club was coming. This called for levels of clean that mere children could not achieve! In fact, mere mortals could not achieve this level of cleandom! Only the cleaning goddess in all her glory (mom) could do this job!! Mom belonged to not one, but TWO bridge clubs. One was a couples club and the other was an all ladies club. The harbinger to BRIDGE CLUB was the purchasing of matching playing cards and Tally Cards. We knew club was really getting close when she came home with salted mixed nuts and Brach's Bridge Mix. Soon recipes for foofy desserts would be lying in neat piles on the kitchen counter. We knew it was time to hide when the cleaning started. BRIDGE CLUB cleaning wasn't like "regular" Saturday cleaning. This was cleaning on a whole new level. This involved BROWN LYSOL.
I recently read that Brown Lysol will kill Norovirus. Norovirus is a gastrointestinal flu that makes you want to DIE. It's wildly contagious and notoriously hard to eradicate. It's the cruise ship flu. I'd like to remind you that non of us had Norovirus, we were just expecting a bunch of women over to eat dessert and pretend like they enjoyed playing bridge. Mom seemed to think that if she scrubbed the house from top to bottom with BROWN LYSOL that she would achieve some level of uber clean. She dusted everything with Pledge, she used Scott's Liquid Gold on the paneling and cupboards. She used Ajax on every porcelain surface. She used Mop n' Glow on the kitchen floor. She Sparkle'd every glass window. Dad was usually out coaching a football game or card table wrangling. My brother and I would slither around the house with stinging eyes, just trying to stay out of her way and not die from the fumes. She would vacuum and then later, if she had time between making mounds of fluffy, peaked meringue for some dessert masterpiece and re-dusting everything, she might pass the vacuum one more time. Finally the card tables with matching table clothes would appear in the dining and living rooms with perfectly placed divided dishes of nuts and candy. That's when we knew we'd lived through another bridge club cleaning hurricane. We'd breathe a sigh of relief and thunder up the stairs to wait out the gales of fake laughter that would soon fill the house. The ridiculously, insanely clean house.
For some reason, I didn't inherit my mother's gene for cleaning rampages. As I sit here on the sofa and gaze around my living room, there's a pair of Tom's socks on the love seat, four soda cans on the end table and assorted dog toys all over the floor. We won't even talk about the tumble-furs that roll across the room at regular intervals since it's shedding season. Those seem to be getting bigger by the day and I swore I saw one with eyes roll under the entertainment center. If my mother walked into my house at this very moment, she would be paralyzed with horror. This is the woman who found a Cheeto, stuck in a cob web under her kitchen cabinets and is still not over it...(that was my dad's fault, by the way)...if she came over here and saw...oh man...I can't even think about it.
Every once in a while, I get freaked out and feel the need to clean. Just last week I ranted and raved about the bathroom until Tom, armed with a bottle of KABOOM and rubber gloves, tackled the schmutz on the porcelain. Little advice: do not use Kaboom without ventilation because his nose is peeling on the inside and he was dizzy for a week. The bathroom, however, is SPARKLING clean! So, send those bridge club ladies right over! Party around the commode!
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