: lower black pain
: lower black pain.
Love Is The Deepest Clean.
2
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Love Is The Deepest Clean.

family [3 of 4] : VISITS
2

The apartment was clean last weekend. Well, weekend before last, actually - we’d done the floors and the bathrooms and the straightening and the dishes and the laundry, totally refreshed both cat boxes, worked all Saturday morning - and then did all the grocery shopping and still had time to watch a movie, after dinner, sitting in our clean apartment.

Then, over the week, we completed another couple of projects that made everything even better - changed all the water filters (including the shower), packed up the Halloween decorations, got the winter coats out, and someone had the bright idea to add a little more storage to the kitchen so the Creuset pan wasn’t in the corner next to the pizza peel with the rolling pin in it! That wasn’t me, I’m not that ambitious right now, though I did institute a quick fix for the mass chaos of the “charging station”; our three-tier wire sculpture of Medusa in her steampunk phase made out of all the cords and plugs we’ve had to buy to power everything (I put it all in a little IKEA square thing with a door on it).

During the week we work a lot, and things organically move around, but you’d think we’d be ready for somebody dropping by; but then we remembered that my mother is coming next week and the apartment… changed. It was like a mirage, all those wavy lines… I mean it looked great before, super spacious and kind of Tardis meets Martha Stewart Living, and clean. But not Mom Visiting clean.

See that? Over there, that bookshelf? See all the books that have been placed HORIZONTALLY on top the other ones? That’s distracting. It pulls the eye. Makes one uneasy. Mom lived through the civil rights movement, she doesn’t deserve that.

And where you stepped down just now… you felt that, right? I don’t know how it got all the way over here but that piece of cat litter under your foot is a boulder. A sharpened stone, like the shard David used to slay Goliath. This woman gave me life, and I endanger hers with gravel? Nay, I say, nay indeed.

And the drawing books and the stuff we got last week for making candles and our new Trogdor board game are on the dining room table in the “ready” position, but 4 people have to eat at the table now so they’re kinda in the way and is that a sock? What is just one sock doing under the couch halfway? And why is there just one sock oh there’s the other one oh those are mine.

It was clean, gorgeous, I swear to you, and this is the that weird time before you put up the Christmas stuff – which covers EVERYTHING; we could have a yak and a pilates reformer in here and nobody’d even see ‘em beneath all our animated snowmen from Hallmark; and twinkly lights are actually really dim lights, and it’s Winter, so we’re not gonna really look at the rug until, like, March.

But NOW? That autumn sun is at just the right angle at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon to illuminate the underside of every piece of furniture and spotlight all the mysterious bits in those divits on the couch with the little buttons sewn in ‘em. Those can’t be are crumbs, because we’re gluten-free and we don’t eat chips!

I’m not stressed, it’ll all get done, we’ll go grocery shopping on Friday and have most of the week-end to really go through everything with a fine tooth comb.

Oh. Comb. Crap. What do I look like? Hold on…

I think I’m gonna have to go grocery shopping today.

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: lower black pain
: lower black pain.
Life’s lemons into rich, dark chocolate.
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Jd Michaels