You can tell alot about a family from what's on their kitchen floor. Not what the floor's made of, but what's there to be swept up.
I have friends with floors so hygienic I could eat a meal then lick the spot clean (not that I would indulge in that privelege, but you get my meaning).
I have to give them credit, they work dilligently maintaining this level of pristeen madness. They walk through a room, stop and gaze, puzzled, at a fixed spot on the carpet. With the locked glare of an owl eyeing it's prey, they bend and pluck an errant shred of trash from their immaculate floor. Between two fingers, at arm's length, still examining the microscopic entity that had dared to contaminate their carpet, they head to the garbage can. That's when it fleetingly occurs to me that my eyesight must be failing me. I didn't see what they picked up. I didn't see it before they picked it up, and I didn't see it as they carried it to the trash can.
I'm immediately ashamed of myself. The fact that I couldn't see that looming boulder of trash sullying my friend's pristine home is bad enough, but her level of cleanliness makes me want to creep quietly back to my house and scrub everything until my fingers bleed. Almost.
Then there's my friend with kids. Her floors are almost as perfect, but she has a defense for her cleanliness slipups. Kids. Plain and simple. From clear across the room she can spot the offending crayon...the wayward Hotwheels car...the stray block. Like an eagle swooping in for a trout, she's across the room in two swift, gliding steps. She sweeps the sinning toy off the floor, and in one graceful move swings around and gives you the "so-sorry-you-had-to-see-that" sort of smile.
These kind of people are admirable. I mean, my gramma used to say, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." But I'm more of a realist. I say, "Cleanliness is next to impossible." Each time I meticulously sweep my kitchen floor, then even more carefully mop it, I form a new resolve: Damp mop---just a quick "lick-and-a-prayer," each day. Then comes the next day. The first day of my damp-mop-each-day resolution.
And the phone rings. Chatting happily, my subconcious hearing picks up running water. "Gotta go...someone didn't jiggle the toilet handle." Then I'm in the bathroom, staring at a pile of towels and jeans, leaning on the counter and absently drawing x's and o's in a glob of toothpaste on the sink. Man, why does it always have to be me that cleans the bathroom? Well...there goes my kitchen floor resolve. Days later, I'm drawing a breath over an iced tea and contemplating my kitchen floor.
It's covered with cookie crumbs and onion skins. Well, not covered, but sort of dusted. "Shreddies" are in all the corners and kind of drifted up against the fronts of my dishwasher and stove.
I bake hundreds of cookies a week for my oldest son's co-workers. He sells them, and I pay my small charge card bills with that hard-earned money. He came home one day and, munching on a cookie, slid me a look. "Mom, how 'bout you make up somma these cookies and I'll take 'em to work and see if the guys wanna buy 'em?" I'll never forget that first cookie day. He came home and proudly handed me twenty dollars. His eyes smiled and I think he was as suprised and excited about it as I was. "Make lots more, Mom. They love 'em!" The rest is history.
Since then, I've re-arranged my kitchen to making the baking more streamline, but when you do this volume of cookie baking, you're bound to drop alot of "shreddy things" on the floor. Oatmeal, flour, brown sugar...it's all there. The cookies are baked, bagged (at which time more shreddies litter the floor), and sold. And then I pay my charge card bills. And then I use the same card to buy things for my family that brings them joy.
My Family loves soup, and I use alot of onions. Have you ever chased an onion skin across a floor being cooled by the breeze of a back door? I have. You won't catch it. It'll hang up somewhere, in a corner or against an appliance. Like the day the dog came tearing in the back door, drooling around a multicolored tennis ball. The air current scooted the onion skin in another direction, with me after it. And then came a teenage boy, laughing hysterically, dashing up the steps in sweaty t-shirt, grass-stained jeans, and ripped tennis shoes. Grabbing the dog, they both took a football roll over the kitchen floor and my attention---and heart---were distracted by the unbridled joy of the moment and the onion skin was forgotten.
There's a fork lying in the crevas between the refrigerator and the bottom cupboard door. It was my son's. As his hands genticulated like a mad orchestra conductor, he gave me a blow by blow reinactment of his winning throw in shotput that day. His face shone as he laughed and careened around the kitchen with his gangling teenage limbs. The Top Ramen was forgotten as his fork accidentally flew from his hand and bolted through the air, landing in the crevas. We both stopped, looked at each other, and burst out laughing. It was my intention to let him finish with his animated story, then retrieve the fork. Intentionally, I didn't rise to pick it up. I wanted nothing to kill this moment. So rarely was he like this. Laughing with complete abandon and joy. Many days were dampened with the typical teenage sulliness. My heart was dancing, and the fork was forgotten.
A milk cap lies under the edge of the dishwasher. My oldest son comes home from work very early in the morning, sometimes two or two-thirty. There's nights when physical problems have me sitting in the quiet, subdued kitchen at that time, and when he comes into the house it's so quiet that it feels like just the two of us in the world. It was one of those mornings when he came home and I was up. He popped the top on a new jug of milk and the lid rolled across the floor and slid almost out of sight. At that moment I realized how hard he worked and how tired he was. His eyes followed the milk cap, his shoulders dropped, and he turned to me with a baleful look.
"Leave it. I'll sweep it out in the morning," I said. "Come sit down."
That morning, we sat in the silent, dark kitchen and talked. Exhausted as he was, he sat and talked to me. We shared so much. For an hour or more, I learned about my oldest son. The person he'd become and the person he'd like to become. His aspirations and hopes. And then we both went off to bed.
Who knows. If he'd stooped to pick up that cap, he may have decided it was the last physical effort he wanted to make for the day. Who knows. If I had gotten up and swept it out, maybe I wouldn't have wanted to sit back down. Maybe I would have just drifted back off to bed.
The bottle cap is still there. And so are the cookie crumbs and onion skins. But I look at this way, I can sweep tomorrow. And besides, I have a defense for my cleanliness slipups. It's called love.
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