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The TRR cottage has mostly wooden floors—elegant, yes, but also a passive-aggressive showcase for every dust bunny with a dream. That means we need to sweep daily. It’s not as if there’s a lot of debris to get rid of, but anything that’s there definitely shows up on our darker floors. I don’t mind the task. It really shouldn’t even take ten minutes, but let’s take a look at how it goes.
I follow a sacred sweeping ritual—part efficiency, part self-preservation. Without it, I might accidentally sweep the same room three times and still leave toast crumbs in the hallway like some kind of domestic breadcrumb Gretel! Starting at the laundry/mud room, I sweep everything into the hallway and then move towards where the hall, kitchen, dining, and living room meet. I sweep each of those rooms in order, bringing everything to a single pile.
At that point, I take the broom and return it to the hall closet. My intention is to get the smaller broom from the pantry. It has a dustpan connected to it, making it easy to finish up the job. Ahhh, if only that were the case.
What happens more often than not is that as I’m putting away the hall broom, I notice that there’s a spill on the Keurig, or a smudge on a mirror, or whatever. Let’s say I divert to the kitchen sink to get a dishcloth for the spill. Having cleaned the spot, I decide that since the dishcloth is already in hand, I should use it to wipe down the island and the counters. Of course, that means I see the stove. That requires getting the glass stovetop cleaner out of the cabinet, rubbing it onto the top, then using the scrubber to clean, then rinsing the remaining cleaner off the stove, then wiping the stove with the dishcloth. Since the dishcloth is now dirty, it cannot remain on the sink. I carry it into the laundry/mud room and hang it on the drying rack, so that it can dry out before being put in the hamper.
If I’m lucky, I don’t actually traipse through the small pile of debris that I was supposed to have swept up ten minutes ago. There have been times, however, when I DID walk right through it – which meant starting the sweeping process over. If I don’t have to start over, I’ll likely realize as I’m standing in the laundry room, that I need to put in a load of laundry. Once that’s going, I can usually be found standing in the doorway between laundry and hall. What was I about to do? I wonder, as I stand staring into the void of my own hallway like a Roomba that’s lost Wi-Fi and the will to live. Twenty minutes have passed since I meant to get the small broom and finish sweeping.
Cue infomercial voice: “Are you tired of completing one task without accidentally beginning six others? Try new TaskTrack 5000—the brain-implant that zaps you gently whenever you’re about to go off-task! Warning: May cause productivity, or mild electrocution.”
And then my phone rings.
While talking on the phone, I realize when I wiped everything down in the kitchen, I forgot to do the dining room table. I put the phone on speaker, get a new dishcloth from the drawer and wipe down the table. Just as I’m finishing up the call, Willie comes in the back door, AND GODZILLA’S HIS WAY RIGHT THROUGH THE DEBRIS PILE.
It’s now been a half hour since I started the sweeping. “There are no ten-minute jobs,” my husband has reminded me time and time again. And honestly, I used to think he was exaggerating. But now, standing in a half-clean kitchen, holding a wet dishcloth, staring at a foot-shaped dent in the debris pile and still holding my phone from the call I forgot to end—I’m convinced he’s a prophet.