The Downside to Cleaning

My friend, Kevin, with the help of his siblings and his kids, has been cleaning his father’s house from top to bottom.  He has been living in the house for for a good part of this year.  After his father’s passing, Kevin began sorting through a house filled with many years of keeping old jars, miscellaneous screws, papers, stray dinnerware pieces, and stacks of half-full boxes of assorted dry goods.

The other night, I stopped down at Kevin’s place to pick up some plastic bottles and glass bottles so I could recycle them along with my own truckload of recyclables.  Kevin looked pale and exhausted.  Apparently, Kevin is a vigorous, if not thrashing, cleaner.

“How’s it going?” I asked as we dragged a couple bags of plastic bottles out to my truck.

“I am just about shot,” he admitted.  “I cleaned out the basement kitchen cupboards today.  I kept getting hotter and hotter as I cleaned.  I was sweating like crazy.  When I finally looked at the thermostat, I saw that it was 90 degrees in the basement!  I must have bumped into the thermostat when I was cleaning.  I was ready to collapse!”

Kevin is also an early riser.  Usually, somewhere near 5:30 in the morning, he sails past my house in his van and drives the two miles of country road out to where our mailboxes are located to retrieve our newspapers.  I wake at about the same time and watch for his returning headlights.  If awake, I will step out to grab my paper from him as he returns home again.

The morning after I picked up Kevin’s recyclables, I watched the headlights of his van swim across the darkness to the drive as he drove back home with our newspapers.  I stepped outside to meet him when he neared my house.

I stood in the early morning chill chatting with him.  “I had a nightmare about black widows last night,” I told him.  “They were everywhere.   I hate spiders.”  I pointed my rolled newspaper skyward in an expansive gesture of disgust.

Kevin’s eyes expanded.  “I killed seven spiders upstairs in my house this morning,” he said.  “Seven,” he repeated.  “I think the heat from when I cleaned my basement drove them upstairs.”

I grimaced.  “Almost makes you want to stop cleaning…”

--Mitchell Hegman