How God Tells You It’s Time To Clean The Kitchen Floor
Shuffling bottles and ingredients while making my breakfast, I skidded a glass jar too abruptly for the modern agglomerate cabinet’s adherence capacity, and heard the sound of an imported jar of Italian anchovies in superior olive oil being strewn on an area of several square feet on the hard stone floor tiles. First instinct (I haven’t yet had my pot of tea) is to sleepily pick up all shattered pieces of glass, carefully wipe with Brawny towels, and get on with life. But since there was lots of glass to deal with, and lots of anchovies, some still neatly in their sad little rows, and large amounts of fragrant oil to perfume the kitchen, the task was not an easy one. Soon, I was adding my own blood to the fishy array surrounding me. And we’re so into recycling, how do you separate this junk into appropriate bins?
Maybe it’s more of a guy thing, but kitchen floors are not my absolute first priority, so there was a bit of kitchen clutter to wipe up as well. Clutter from the last few weeks. After the first, emergency wiping, the room smelled like a wonderful Caesar salad. But I made my tea and read my emails while my cut healed.
The task lay before me to get out the Mr. Clean, the bucket, the cloths, and get on with my duty. In this house, if you spill it, you clean it up (This rule applies mostly to me). Surprisingly, I was really starting to enjoy the wiping, rinsing, wiping, reminding myself with pleasure of housecleaning at my Mother’s knees on Saturday mornings back home in the 60s, the moral superiority we enjoyed from having everything nice back then. And my own kitchen was starting to smell now like, well… a much milder version of a Caesar salad, and looked great too.