Cleaning Up My Act

[poliphilo]

I 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?

Comments

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

We live next door to an unpaved alley, and Colorado is notoriously dusty and dry as it is, so I've come to love my two HEPA filters (one for the bedroom, one for the living room).

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We only have house dust to contend with. This is a notoriously damp part of the world. We're just across the water from Ireland- and you know how much rain they get!