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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 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!
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:
One of the most frustrating things about living with two dogs is the never-ending physical effort required to clean animal hair off of every horizontal surface in the house. Twice a year as our dogs shed their summer and winter coats we have to dedicate weeks of our lives to ridding our dark woods floors of tan and black hair, a seemingly useless task as once we’ve swept up a certain corner it will fill back up within minutes. After several seasons of this madness we finally invested in a special tool that removes animal hair by the fistfuls. In fact, during one grooming session we removed enough hair off of the older dog to stuff the cushions on a six-foot long couch.
The tool isn’t perfect, and the dogs still shed a tiny bit as they wander around the house, just enough that the act of cleaning it up is still pleasurable. Okay, a lot pleasurable. Many times I will post pictures of my dogs sitting on our hardwood floors and people will ask me how on earth I manage to maintain such clean floors. And the answer is, oh, I don’t know, one part vacuum cleaner, two parts mental illness, and a dollop of Photoshop if I’ve missed anything.
Of course, one of the best things about living with two dogs is how well they keep the kitchen floors clean, and as a family we’ve grown terribly lazy when it comes to wiping up spilled food or liquids. It’s taken our daughter a few years to accept the idea of sharing her breakfast cereal with the dogs, two animals whose existence she loathes, and I finally had to say, look, when you drop a Cheerio don’t worry about climbing down out of your chair and doing all the work it takes to clean up the mess. LET THE DOGS DO IT FOR YOU. She finally realized that there were advantages to living with such filthy creatures, meaning I might have her one step closer to understanding the joy of what it feels like to rid a floor of their winter coats.
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