Miss
Peach Explains
Promiscuity to a Toddler
by Catie Rosemurgy
Long
Gone Daddy
by Lee Normant
Cleaning
Theory
by Janet Wondra
|
Cleaning
Theory
Janet Wondra
Sometimes Ilike to think about cleaning.
Please do not confuse thinking
with doing, though. Who would prefer mopping to trimming the
sails while rounding the point of a small tropical island,
for example? Or lounging in a
coffeehouse or even in front of the TV—which is not
to say cleaning lacks its own peculiar satisfactions. But
it is, ultimately, a chore, a repetitive activity that bears
within it the seeds of its own undoing.
Furthermore, thinking about cleaning
doesn’t occupy my mind any more than the influence of
the jet stream on weather patterns in the United States or
risk theory or the enigma of thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit.
Of course I meditate on cleaning as I clean, but I would prefer
for my thoughts to wander without a dustcloth in my hand or
a canister of scouring powder. Cleaning is best contemplated
while reclining, with a clean house surrounding you. I’ve
found (and I’ve been at this for years) that one’s
thinking is subtly disrupted by newspapers scattered on the
Persian carpet and the nearly imperceptible ringing as motes
of dust strike the Wling cabinet.
What fascinates me is the lore of
cleaning, the secret society created when women talk about
housekeeping as one cog in the complex machinery of their
lives, and the very gendered question of cleanliness as an
ethic. There are specific rules for cleaning, ones that are
sometimes not inherited by the next generation or are mistransmitted—some
untidy synapse in the brain of the orderly world. Normally
these rules are handed down on the distaff side, as we used
to say, from grandmother to mother to daughter, from time
immemorial and onward into eternity. If we ask why—why
Comet instead of Ajax?—there may be a specific answer,
but just as often the reply is, “Well, that’s
what your grandmother used.” But cleaning theory is
always evolving, even if we are unconscious of the innovations.
We no longer throw sand on the floor, as pioneer women did,
using it as a primitive polish as a well as a matrix to trap
even finer grains of dirt when sweeping, nor do we use it
to scour pans. Yet I like to feel myself linked to these foremothers
even as I suspect they would be appalled by my cleaning habits.
Continued
in volume 41, issue 3, summer 2005 |
