Cleaning Up My Act
Mar. 11th, 2009 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI dust the model village and its inhabitants with a little, retractable brush that came out of Ailz's make-up bag. The dust curls away like smoke, vanishing into the air to settle someplace else. That was always my objection to housework; you only ever move the gunk around; it's a treadmill you never get off.
A bit like life, in fact.
Life as housework. Keeping the dust at bay- the dust to which we shall all return.
Brrrrrrr......
I was never a great one for housework- and it's not just because I'm a bloke. My three primary female role models- my mother and two grandmothers- were exactly the same. As middle-class, mid-century women they used to pay people (poorer women) to do it for them.
And then there's the Bohemian thing. How very bourgeois it is to care about appearances- and what the neighbours think. Dirt and dust are real. Like sex, like death. Embrace them all!
But, I don't know, I seem to be changing. These past few weeks I've taken to carrying a duster in my pocket. Now, if I find myself at a loose end, I can whip it out and drag it across surfaces. The dust is encroaching and will win in the end- but I intend to go down fighting. Non passeran!
We have friends from church coming to tea this afternoon and I have been tidying, dusting- even mopping floors. And because these are friends from church I have temporarily purged the model village of its "figures of an erotic nature". (Check 'em out here.) I lift the little, naked people out of the castle keep, tickle them all over with the retractable make-up brush and put them away in a cupboard. The dust swirls and disappears. Does this make me a hypocrite?
A bit like life, in fact.
Life as housework. Keeping the dust at bay- the dust to which we shall all return.
Brrrrrrr......
I was never a great one for housework- and it's not just because I'm a bloke. My three primary female role models- my mother and two grandmothers- were exactly the same. As middle-class, mid-century women they used to pay people (poorer women) to do it for them.
And then there's the Bohemian thing. How very bourgeois it is to care about appearances- and what the neighbours think. Dirt and dust are real. Like sex, like death. Embrace them all!
But, I don't know, I seem to be changing. These past few weeks I've taken to carrying a duster in my pocket. Now, if I find myself at a loose end, I can whip it out and drag it across surfaces. The dust is encroaching and will win in the end- but I intend to go down fighting. Non passeran!
We have friends from church coming to tea this afternoon and I have been tidying, dusting- even mopping floors. And because these are friends from church I have temporarily purged the model village of its "figures of an erotic nature". (Check 'em out here.) I lift the little, naked people out of the castle keep, tickle them all over with the retractable make-up brush and put them away in a cupboard. The dust swirls and disappears. Does this make me a hypocrite?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-03-11 03:31 pm (UTC)There are dusting wands that I find don't send the dust flying. They gather it up in the disposable lemon-
scented dusters you attach to the wand. They may be wasteful but they work so nicely.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-11 08:41 pm (UTC)I'm happy to go on using a big yellow duster of the kind I grew up with. Apart from anything else, it's reusable.