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If there was one household chore that I not only disliked, but really and truly despised, it was laundry. Oh, but I hated laundry. My procrastination was legendary, the number of loads left mildewing in the washer were embarrassing, my folding skills pathetic, my tolerance for getting dressed from towering piles of clothes on the floor ridiculously high.
So whenever someone talked about – oh, God – CLOTH DIAPERING, I probably didn’t do such a good job at hiding my horror. Clearly, I was talking to a crazy person. I once saw someone confess on their blog that not only did they not mind washing their cloth diapers, they kind of found it fun. That right there, I remember thinking, is someone who does not get out very much. When you get out of the house, you see, you no longer have to look at your laundry piles, which is pretty much the entire point.
Hey! Looky:
Laundry pile is hungry! Hungry for your precious leisure time! Feed me with your minutes and your tears! NOM NOM!
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“What can I do to help?
“Please let me know what I can do to help.”
“I want to help.”
“Please tell me how to help.”
I’ve said all these variations and more many times over the past couple months, to my mother. I know other people have too. She’s the primary caregiver to my very ill father – a role that she accepts without question or complaint, but oh, my God, it’s a weird, special sort of hell.
She never goes anywhere – she’s lived with a broken tooth for two months now, unable to keep a dentist appointment in the midst of my father’s never-ending barrage of appointments with cardiologists and pulmonologists and therapists and ists, ists, ists. She never does anything for herself, short of sneaking away for a half hour late at night to read a few chapters of a book. I arrived this week to find the refrigerator stocked with applesauce and yogurt and nutritional shakes for my dad but absolutely no food for my mother to make for herself. (I asked her if she wanted me to pick up any dessert from a local restaurant and she immediately reminded me of my dad’s diabetes, because it simply didn’t occur to her that I was offering to bring something for HER.)
People offer help and she’s more apt to stammer polite thanks than accept it. The help she has accepted – unsurprisingly – revolves around my dad. Getting him down the stairs and into the car for appointments, picking up prescriptions, restocking their supply of applesauce and nutritional shakes.
You know what my mom really wants? And needs? What anyone in her situation probably wants and needs? A clean house.
I grew up in the disposable eighties and started taking care of my own home in the mid-nineties, and have never had any trouble buying up specialty cleansers for every purpose: from cleaning windows to cutting stovetop grease, to inhibiting mildew in showers to getting rid of hard water around your faucets. And don’t even get me started on the disinfectant wipes.
In the past three or four years, though, I’ve discovered the joys of this.
I feel a little behind the time, as people have used distilled white vinegar as an all-purpose cleaner for generations. And now I know why:
* Its uses are endless. I find new ways to use it all the time.
* It costs virtually nothing.
* It doesn’t leave your house with a perfumey “cleanser scent.”
Besides the obvious—dyeing Easter eggs—here are the many ways I’ve used vinegar in my house over the past month:
When my husband and I had been married a few years, we spent nine months living in a house with carpeting in the kitchen. It was a very short pile carpet, granted, but absorbent nonetheless. At the time I had two small children—a four-year-old and a two-year-old. And anyone who has four-year-olds and two-year-olds knows that while kids that age are able to feed themselves, it usually isn’t without mess. Mess on the table. Mess on the clothes. Mess on the floor. Mess.
Meals became a source of doom for me. Not only was there the regular cleanup of dishes and utensils, there was usually a 15-to-20 minute ordeal to get the carpeted floor back to normal. Where a hard surface would permit simply sweeping or wiping up chunks of food and spills, carpeting required my picking up piece after piece—and crumb after crumb—by hand lest they be ground further in. And twice a day, it seemed, I was on my knees with a hot, soapy rag, wiping the carpet of some sticky spill.
Then one day, I came up with a perfect solution: I got a dog.
I had it in my head that my college friend once made a video of himself folding a fitted sheet (a skill he learned working in his father’s laundromat) and submitted it to MTV in the 1990s as a veejay audition. It turns out this never happened, but this week we decided that it was still a pretty good idea. This is a useful video, because not only does it show how to fold a fitted sheet, it shows what a disaster your house becomes when your college friend comes over to shoot a mid-90s music video about how to fold a fitted sheet and your baby decides this process is way more interesting than a nap. Also, it shows how good it is to have a friend with laundry experience who’s also found a few days’ lull in his career as a television producer/editor:
If you missed it, folding a fitted sheet is really very simple:
(1) Turn the whole sheet inside out and hold it the long way.
(2) Feel inside for the two corners and get your hands snug up inside.
(3) Clap your hands together and flip the corner in your right hand over your left hand.
(4) Straighten the sheet’s edges.
(5) Repeat steps (1) through (3) with the other end.
(6) Straighten and fold. You’re done!
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