I wrote this nearly two years ago. Today, there’s nothing left but silence, an errant dust bunny I can’t bear to pick up, and uninterrupted tears.
It’s nice to have Rosie The Cat around. She tells me things.
Last night during the 7:00 o’clock crazies, she came tearing from the porch into the den, kicking up a small cloud of dust that swirled in the long beams of sunlight yawning across the floor, scampered over the sofa, paused, and looked at me for a second, and then, with a sneeze and a squeak, went tearing back out of the room.
Time to clean, I think, as a dust bunny settles in a cozy spot by the door.
Cleaning is like loading a dishwasher: there’s only one right way to do it. It’s just so surprising that no one else seems to know the right way except me. I start upstairs with the ceiling fans, working my way slowly down. Gravity works; dust settles. If I began downstairs and worked my way upstairs, the dust would descend on my beautifully clean downstairs.
It had only been a few months since I last cleaned, although I may have run the vacuum once. Anyway, I decided this should be a second-degree cleaning day: straighten up (ignoring the things in the closets from the last second-degree cleaning), dust (including baseboards), shake out rugs and bed covers, fluff the pillows, vacuum. I thought about the windows—they “tilt in for easy cleaning!”—but the Windex was downstairs, and I wasn’t, so I will remain in a blur. Maybe next time.
I’m writing this now instead of cleaning. Without my sneezing Rosie, it would probably be many more months between cleanings. It’s not particularly hard, or I get overly tired; it’s a very small house with very small rooms: the dusting gets to me. For instance:
There’s a picture on Lynn’s dresser. I must have taken it. She’s on the beach with her mom. Her mom hated the beach, but the summer this picture was taken was when she came down to spend a couple of days with us. She took the bus because Howard refused to drive back and forth “all the way to goddamn New Jersey!” twice. It’s a 4 1/2 hour bus ride from her house in Wilmington, one-way. But there she is, in profile, in sunglasses, sitting in a sand chair under the beach umbrella she gave us for Christmas a few years earlier, looking out at the ocean, a smile on her face. Lynn is kneeling in the sand behind her. Both arms are lightly wrapped around her, and she’s resting her chin on the top of her mom’s beautiful gray hair, looking toward the ocean. But Lynn does not see the sea. She’s looking at what may have been but never could have been, and the vision gives her a distant, serene expression.
The beach was always an escape for Lynn. It was a transcendent place. Crossing the bridge to Seven Mile Island for Lynn was like leaving the real world for the place she saw in that frozen moment in that dusty picture. Her life as it could have been. For Lynn, the sea was vast, unfathomable, and uncaring about the land; patient. She loved the sea, and the beach was her respite.
Rosie hates the vacuum and hides when it’s on. When she no longer heard it, she came upstairs and demanded attention through my tears.
It’s nice to have Rosie The Cat around. She tells me things.