cleanliness is next to inspiration... or procrastination

I took the day ‘off’ on Monday. I set myself with a few tasks, namely a start to packing up my life at Auburn Street. It’s something I have to do… but have the cushion of six weeks within which to complete it. And it’s not… entirely… something I really want to do. So, of course, in the determination to avoid doing it I managed to assign myself a list of things to do instead.

You might ask when seeing this list exactly what about these tasks was more appealing than throwing things in a box. Wash the kitchen floor. Scrub the shower. Wash curtains. Clean the pollen, road soot, and grease off the kitchen window screen (with a dryer sheet, thankyouverymuch Living Simple). Clean under the range of the stove (seriously gross). Wipe down dust and cobwebs that have probably settled since I moved into the apartment.  

I was thinking as I was scrubbing away the grime from one of these surfaces that no one is really going to notice my accomplishments. No one I live with will even care… as evidenced by the plain and simple fact most of that filth has escaped notice for so long. So… why do it? Why even bother?

And then… I realized… I liked doing it.

Weird girl.

Okay. I’m not saying I’m going to look forward to getting on my hands and knees and scrubbing these stained surfaces. But… I take a certain amount of satisfaction from seeing it clean. And every time I wash dishes (another task that gives me a certain amount of joy) I smile at how very new that screen looks now.

Obviously it isn’t necessary. It’s a certain vanity… which… maybe if I had such income I could pay someone else to do and make my effort unnecessary. But, seriously, if I ever had that option, I wouldn’t want to give it to someone else. Maybe that’s a control issue. Or maybe making a surface clean again is its own form of stress relief.

I suppose this contemplation isn’t completely out of context. I’ve been watching a lot of Upstairs Downstairs and wondering how a person could content themselves cleaning up after the idle rich. How one could feel fulfilled. And of course, one narrator of my current novel is a housekeeper. I’ve struggled with why she would be content to be that… why she would give up an opportunity to be something else and go back to it. 

So maybe this delight with cleaning is just a passing thing until I figure out Agnes’ journey. Or maybe, really, it’s just that scrubbing the muck off the range is an easier act of letting go than packing up a home and wiping away the reality of my last four years.