Slippery When Wet

 

Scrubbing the Floor

The house is being mopped again to the tune of Billy Idol. We have lived in this house for four months and it has been mopped more times than my living spaces were mopped total in the past fifteen years. We even bought a mop bucket. I guess my orange Home Depot 5 gallon just doesn’t cut it in domestic life. But that’s what it is like living with someone who believes in cleanliness. 

Most days, I come home from work covered head to toe in sawdust, tile shavings, foam insulation or grout. There is so often so much dirt in my shoes that I leave footprints in my socks. Living without plumbing for four years, I just became accustomed to a certain level of dustiness. But now that I have moved up in the world into a real house with a shower, I don’t have an excuse for living in filth. 

I jest, but it isn’t that bad to live in a clean house. There is less dog hair on my clothes. Fewer dust bunnies emerging from beneath the furniture to claim more territory. Less spider webs hanging from light fixtures like an Addams Family episode. I am a tidy person because you have to be tidy if you live in small spaces or you can never find anything. But I have recently learned that cleanliness and tidiness are two very different things. I accept that. 

At least our house doesn’t smell like bleach. We all know those folks who take sanitation a little too seriously. You walk in the front door and get slapped across the face with the smell of Lysol. It smells like the cleaning products aisle of Target. Our house is not that clean and for that I am thankful. But the floor sure is slippery when wet. 

I giggle at the thought of Slippery When Wet as I skid my way across the living room to the chair, now dog fur free. Inspired by the Spaceballs movie, I bought my first Bon Jovi CD as a sophomore in high school. With a walkman I bought off an upperclassman for thirty bucks and the headphones that predated earbuds and clipped around your ears, I would listen to the CD twenty times a day, every day until I found Def Leppard a few months later. 

In the back of study hall, silently mouthing the words to Wanted Dead or Alive. Murmuring the words to Raise Your Hands on the back of the school bus. Switching the volume to maximum when I stepped off the bus for my mile long walk home from the bus stop. Wild in the Streets would come screaming out of my mouth on repeat before I even understood what the euphemisms meant. Our few neighbors must have been appalled. I am thankful that social media wasn’t around then, god forbid someone captured those moments of me spontaneously playing air guitar to Livin on A Prayer with my backpack as I high kicked down the dirt road. 

Eventually, I would come sliding through the front door of home, peeling my headphones off as I kicked my muddy shoes off. The tile floor was spotless. Shania Twain or Lucinda Williams blasted from the stereo in the sitting room. The vacuum cleaner howled from upstairs. Top item on my chore list was to feather-dust downstairs before dinner. Twenty years later, I grab the feather duster and step ladder and do my chores. Years may come and go, but house cleaning lasts forever. With the right soundtrack, it’s not that bad.