 Housecleaning is such a relative term—each person has their own standard for what a "house" is—let alone "clean." For me, cleaning means taking everything that is not affixed to the walls down, moving every stick of furniture "somewhere else," washing down every wall (repainting the ones that don't make it through this process), dusting every book, polishing every piece of silver, and shining up every knickknack.
Housecleaning, to my spouse, is a different matter. Sweeping the open spaces between furniture, dusting off the bookshelves in front of the books, and picking up the clean clothes from the piles in the living room are first on his agenda. Then, making the beds, hanging up what clothes he can find on hangers (the rest stay in their respective piles), and clearing a path from our son's bedroom door to the bed constitutes the rest of the cleanup. After that, the spiders are on their own.
I once yelled at my spouse for tracking mud into my freshly polished dining room. "So? You clean all the time," he said to me as he reluctantly removed his shoes. "Yes, I do, but since I'm the one on my hands and knees polishing the floors, I guess I can do whatever I want," I reminded him. "If you want to polish the floors by hand, you can let monkeys poop here for all I care." He laughed and stopped tracking in the elements.
I don't feel a housecleaning is sincere without the inside of the fridge getting done. I usually save that for around Easter. While my Jewish friends are madly scrubbing the whole house, including every speck of old food from their kitchens, taking down the special plates, and putting in brand-new shelf paper, I'm swabbing out the fridge. It's an easy job to overlook—with those big, dark-colored veggie bins in the bottom of it, all the spills stay quite nicely out of sight. The refrigerator walls I get to occasionally, when Kool-Aid streaks and bits of butter have collided to form surrealistic art forms unseen since they shut down the Fillmore, but the bottom of the fridge, in the depression under those bins—that's another story. Add water to the dry, crusty layers there and new life would spring up instantaneously.
Cleaning out the fridge also requires assessing the food items you have collected in the past year. In the late 80s it was designer mustards—we must have had 15 little pots filled with various shades of seedy, yellowish-brown stuff passing itself off as elegant hot dog dressing. Now, there's a 25-gallon jug of neon-yellow French's from Costco squatting down on the bottom shelf in the back with a dark brown yellow rim of ... oh, I just clean it off.
In the early 90s we went through the designer beer fad and the imported cheese craze, and by '96 we had every type of mushroom known to man in our crisper bins. Now, with a 9-year-old in the house, there are lots of baby carrots (carrotteenies to those in the know), boxed juice, cheese sticks and yogurt-to-go. And, for me, boxed wine (easier than finding a corkscrew).
The best part about housecleaning is that once I have thoroughly attacked and conquered a room, it has a spit-shine polish Army personnel just dream of. There is no junk drawer, for all the "junk" has been sorted and put in its proper place. The curtains are hung, with nice, new pleats after I pull out the iron and the starch, and the dust bunny bodies are buried for another year.
Unfortunately, it takes so much effort to get even one room of our six-room house clean, between the PTA and the play dates, between the groceries and the cleaners, the carpools and the nail salon (mommy treat!) that I have never, in my whole life, seen my whole house clean at once. By the time I finish one room, the one behind me has deteriorated. And like the Golden Gate Bridge painters, who finish at one end just in time to start over at the other, so, too, do I start all over again when I reach the end. It takes me almost exactly a year, so I get to the fridge every April 15. Right after the joy of tax time.
Deborah can be reached at dthollis@svcn.com.
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