Cleaning Up

It's all about technique.

CLEANING UP

by Benjamin Trayne

People who know me will probably think this is pretty funny, but it really wasn't. I had to live it. It was interesting in its own way, but it was also something I wouldn't choose to repeat, for a very long time. Housecleaning. I'm sure I won't.

Who am I? It's more like, "what". Without doubt, my ex-wife could think of many descriptive terms for me, none of which would be at all flattering. From my own viewpoint, I don't know of any commonly acceptable single word for a divorced male. I couldn't even find a word for it in a web search. I guess we're just “divorced guys.” I must summarily reject the name “mud” although there's another common epithet I can think of, that when used as an adjective, fits rather well. Except that for the most part, we no longer are. Most ex-wives give each of us a long dry spell leading up to the divorce that serves to break us into it easy. Intended to be self-serving, it's an inadvertently-contributed blessing in disguise.

Likely some would argue that “divorcee” applies to both males and females. Well, that word sounds French, and I don't want any fancy-assed French term applied to me. If somebody tells me otherwise, I will only disagree, so I'll warn all such somebodies in advance, forget about it. Sure, since I was married a good long time, I am well-used to always being wrong, but I've also got a lot of practice at denying it. The word “divorcee” applies to women, period. But unfortunately I can no longer lay claim to “bachelor” because I was once foolish enough to get married, I can't call myself a “widower” because she still lives. Ha. It's a world of bad choices, sometimes. And one of those bad choices, is what to do about cleaning up.

All those years I'd wondered what the wife did while I was at work. Some of it must have been straightening up the house, putting things in order and running the vacuum cleaner. I figured this out because nobody does it anymore, and she's the missing element. Of course, usually the female “divorcee” scores the house, and you get a cheap apartment. This is maybe another blessing in disguise, because you'll never have to do housework. If you can get through a one-year lease without having to clean up, you're set. All you gotta do is move.

But in my case, I did get to keep the house. It turns out that if you owned it free and clear before you married her and her name isn't on the deed, it works that way. If she's run you into debt so that now you have a big mortgage, well, that's a separate issue and it remains your problem.

So while you're innocently trying to get over it, you just go on living your life, re-learn to do some dishes and occasionally you run a load of laundry. “Keeping up appearances” is what it's all about. It's still necessary to wear reasonably clean clothing to work, they kind of expect that out of you. However at home you can still mostly do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't involve anybody else. I'd never consider re-marrying, so since I can't afford to pay a housekeeper, a certain, shall we say, “clutter” accumulated.

I also got to keep the pets, by the way. I have some dogs and some cats, and the wife always wanted to keep them inside. I'd built good insulated doghouses for the dogs, but after a while everyone just sort of moved indoors. Now that they are all getting older, I don't have the heart to move them back outside. But let me tell you, pet hair is not your friend. I'd always thought they only shed once a year, in the spring. Turns out they shed all the damn time, it's just really a lot each spring. Why, within the first week after the ex-wife split,  you couldn't even tell what color the carpet was underneath the pet hair. Couple that with a few get-togethers with the guys, you know, football, pizza, beer and peanuts, and you soon find out that they're all pigs, just like you. They leave their beer cans sit right there on the floor, the windowsill, the radiator, wherever they were when they finished 'em. I hated to do it, but I had to institute a smoke-outside-only policy, because pet hair catches fire really easily, not to mention the stink when it burns.

So, after the first four or so years, it was getting a little hard to have any more get-togethers. I considered having a clean-up party, but thinking about it, I soon realized nobody would show up. A general build-up of “stuff” along every exposed wall soon started to reach the height where gravity begins to take over, and like a seething pyroclastic flow, the stuff moved downward and inward, toward the center of each room. Books, retired satchels full of important stuff, a box with a treasured contact printer in it, a big box of cds, unopened bills from the last couple of years, and so on. And on. The advancing tide of stuff knocked over the beer cans and generally made a pain in the ass of itself. On the plus side, I considered, there'd be less area to vacuum when I eventually got to it.

When I did find myself alone, one the cool things I thought I would do was to buy a genuine key-wound antique wall clock, the kind with a pendulum. I chose well. I found a really nice old clock that had once hung in a train station, no doubt in the days of steam locomotives. Someone had refinished the burled oak clock case, and despite many handmade parts in the works, it still kept great time. But then one of my sons bestowed upon me another kitten, one he found out that he couldn't keep, because he lives in an apartment where pets aren't allowed. I found her batting at the glass on the bottom part of the clock, trying to get at that moving pendulum. I had to either stop the clock or clean up so she couldn't get to it anymore. Of course, it was no contest. I stopped the clock.

But eventually, the deepening pet hair situation got the better of me. There's a certain bouquet, or perhaps for greater accuracy I shall invoke the little-used term odoriferousness, to a lot of accumulated pet hair. If there was any spilled beer, pizza crusts or crushed peanut shells in there, you wouldn't know it 'cause you couldn't see them, but there's always the possibility that such things had enhanced the overall scent. There really wasn't any point in posting air fresheners around at strategic points, because it became a general stink. The dogs didn't seem to mind it, though. A dog or two would disappear for a few hours at a time in the living room. When I say disappear, I mean you'd have had to poke around with a stick to find them. It's possible it was just a camouflage situation, and not just feet-deep pet hair. Doesn't matter which it is, if you can't find 'em.

My house faces south, and the prevailing wind comes from the west. It was a learning process, but I discovered that if I opened a window on each end of the house, the west wind would carry some of the top layer out into the yard. The original idea I had was to infuse my indoor environment with some fresh air, but it did more than that. No doubt there's a satellite photo on the internet somewhere of my place, with a fan-shaped brown spot showing on the lawn, just off the east end of my house. It isn't dead grass.

Indeed for a while, there was a socks benefit. In a halfway normal situation, pet hair clinging to socks is a real pain. If you save up enough pet hair though, you won't even need socks. Nobody'll know the difference. And yet, the depth of the stuff hides small items, you know, things dog-sized or smaller, and you have to wear shoes everywhere to keep from getting hurt. And although the upper kitchen cabinets were still mostly dog-hair free, keeping it out of the silverware drawer was getting to be a challenge.

I had to draw the line at the silverware. Everybody has limits.

So, I saved my money, didn't pay a few of the usual bills and then I called a cleaning service to come and have a look. The lady that showed up spoke Spanish very well, but I don't. The phone receptionist at the cleaning company wanted to talk about cleaning only if I'd do a contract, and I couldn't do that. I figured, fine, at least I'll get an idea what it would cost, and maybe I can talk some sense into them when they get here. I mean, I just wanted to get it cleaned up. I didn't necessarily need to keep it clean.

It turned out, getting this lady  to come here was a bad idea. How was I to know she'd get mad? She had apparently introduced herself in rapidly-spoken Spanish, or for all I know, maybe it was Portuguese. Then without waiting to find out if I'd understood a word she'd said, she went sailing past me and through my front door to confront the proposed task at hand. I should mention, she was really short. I'm not sure she broke the five-foot mark.

I guess she had entered the foyer a little too quickly and had stirred up a little breeze. Ty, my big chocolate lab, put his paws right up on her shoulders and gave her a couple of big wet doggy slurps. Immediately, she looked like she needed a shave. What more can I say? Between the spits and sputters and yelling and screaming, I heard the words “madre dios” used a lot, and I think I heard “caramba” in there, whatever that means. But what got the message across was the fist-shaking and shouting, which she did all the way down the driveway from the window of her car.

I don't think she wanted to clean my house.

I thought, you know, maybe this problem can be eliminated little by little. I took a plastic grocery bag and scooped up some of the dander and stuff, and took it out to the trash can. I felt like I'd really accomplished something. I considered, I can do this every day. After a while, it will all be gone. But after a week of it, you couldn't tell the difference, in fact it might have become worse. So I upped it to two bags a day, then three. There was no question, it was still getting worse. Maybe pet hair can breed and multiply. Or perhaps a couple of stray dogs or cats had welcomed themselves in when I wasn't looking. There really wasn't any way to tell. So, I gave it up and resolved to take a week's vacation. That should do it. I would take an entire week off, and would dedicate it to cleaning up.

What's that they say about the best-laid plans? Or about the road to hell being paved with good intentions? I can see how that happens, now...

I fixed the faucet leak, I adjusted the furnace, I cleaned out the flue pipe, I changed my car's oil. I even did the damned dishes. All of them. Whatever I hadn't really felt like doing before was now suddenly more attractive than what I'd taken the week off to do. I could see that my vacation week would end with the problem unresolved, unless I actually got off my ass and did something about it. After all, it was already Friday.

So I called the cleaning service back. I mean, I was desperate. If this thing didn't get fixed I would soon be out of time. It was getting hard to get dressed and to look somewhat presentable for my daily job. I explained the problem, and pleaded for help. “Perhaps you even know an independent you could refer me to,” I begged.

“Just a minute,” responded the receptionist, and she obviously was carrying on a conversation with somebody else in the room. I thought perhaps she had been having the conversation before I called, and now she just wanted to finish it. Soon there was enough haw-hawing and cackling going on that I was sure of that. Eventually, though, she came back to the phone.

“Sir, we do have someone we recommend for the really big jobs,” she explained. “If we send her to you, you gotta promise to follow her instructions. It's just the way she works. If you do, your place will get cleaned. Her name is Edna. Please note, she does not work for us.”

I quickly agreed. I really needed some help.

So about an hour and a half later, I was visited by a walking, talking, living nightmare. There's really no way to accurately describe Edna. Nobody would really ever believe it if I managed it.

The first sign of her arrival was the hammering of an engine that was about to go “smack” for the last time. Edna's rusted, formerly blue 1962 Chevy Biscayne had just pulled into my driveway. I stepped out onto the porch and took a look. One side of the old car was so close to the pavement, I really thought it had a broken spring. But when Edna got out, the car rose to almost level. I was horrified, even from a distance. Edna appeared to be in her late fifties or early sixties and had a gray pile of natty-looking hair on top of her head, horn-rimmed glasses and at least four chins. I still can't believe she was wearing jeans. I shudder every time the image comes to call, because I couldn't shake the tendency to imagine her trying to put them on. She was wearing her chest around her waist, and altogether, at about five-foot-six, had to go four hundred pounds. I have friends who've shot black bears that weren't that big. She had a cigarette poking out of the side of that face, and when she waddled up the walk and spoke, the cigarette never moved, although it was obviously afire. Her mouth alternately formed squares and parallelograms as she spoke.

“So you're the lazy dude that needs his crummy house cleaned,” she rasped. With considerable effort, she took the two steps up onto the porch, and then looked me over, top to bottom. I felt like I was being eaten alive. Then she waddled around me, and said with that gravelly voice, “Got potential.” Then she stepped back and put her fat hands on her hips...I mean, her sides. Gahh!

“Here's how it works,” she said, matter of factly, that cigarette never budging, “I run the shovel and you run the wheel-barra. You gotta help. If it takes even an hour more'n a day, you gotta pay fer both days.”

Edna had turned slightly, peering through a front window. “Holy shit,” she said, “That is bad in there.”

As she looked, I saw a tattoo of an Asian yin-yang, commonly associated with martial arts, on her left bicep. The bicep was all flab now, although I could picture her with real muscles, which I'd bet she once had. But now gravity had made the formerly round symbol into a sagging, elongated oval. I was a bit amused at the image it produced in my mind of Edna trying to complete a high-roundhouse kick. Nevertheless, I was dealing with an almost overpowering urge to run. She began waddling around me again, and suddenly I felt my left rear cheek in a surprisingly powerful grip from one of those fat hands. “Haaa,” she growled with that gravelly voice, “Maybe we can work somethin' out, honey!”

That tore it. I ran! Down over the steps in a single leap, out the sidewalk and toward the street. Then I stopped, certain she could never catch me anyway, and turned.

“Be gone when I get back,” I gasped, “or I'll call the cops! I don't want your 'services'!”

Then I stalked out onto the street, hoping like hell she actually would leave. After that sort of introduction, I wasn't sure. As I walked up the street, I heard “Chicken shit!” shouted from my front porch. Definitely! Every time I thought about that misshapen mouth forming the word “honey”, it made my skin crawl.

That incident killed Friday. I went home, made sure she was gone, then went inside and opened a beer. Then another. After some careful thought, I decided the wheelbarrow was probably a good idea, but not for just one guy. It struck me to call in some favors my best buddy owed me. So that evening, I called Mel. I lied, and told him I needed a lift with a big air conditioner.

Mel was aghast when he found out what I really wanted. “I thought you were my friend,” he exclaimed, “but you lied to me!”

“Well, I needed you to come over, Mel, who's always there when the money's a little short? Whose tools do you borrow?”

“Exactly!” Mel fired back. “Those were favors! This is more than a favor! For this crap, you would've had to take a bullet for me.”

That remark made me laugh, and pretty soon Mel was laughing too. After a while, he relented.

“Hell, I guess it's not so bad. No worse than watching some poor sot promise his life away in a Saturday wedding ceremony,” he said. “But even though you have to feel sorry for the poor bastard, at least most of the time you get to drink afterward.”

“We got beer,” I reminded him. We adjourned until morning. Mel went home to argue with his wife about why he wouldn't be home Saturday to do her bidding. I knew there was no more than a fifty-fifty chance she'd let him come to help me out. I didn't sleep very well. Without Mel's help I knew I wouldn't have the fortitude to tackle this job at all. And the biggest reason I couldn't sleep was the only other alternative I'd been shown. Edna. You can't un-ring a bell, un-fire a gun, or otherwise roll back what's happened. All you can do is to let it get old. The women at the cleaning service had been laughing about sending her here, not some other topic. Damn them.

That one will take a while to forget. The divorce was definitely easier.

The new day arrived at last, a shimmering mid-summer morning in my quiet country neighborhood. I live just outside of a small town, but homes have gradually appeared around mine because the pastoral atmosphere is so pleasant here. It's a bit of countryside that's not too far the grocery store. I got myself a bowl of too-old corn pops, discovered I was out of milk again, and ate them dry. Then I opened a lite beer, the best kind for breakfast, and sat down on the front steps to wait for Mel. I wasn't even thinking about Mel not showing up.

When he did, he was not his usual happy self. Mel's old pickup bounced into my driveway, and he shut it off and got out. His glum countenance immediately suggested that he wasn't here for long. The Missus had no doubt sent him over to beg off.

“I've always considered you to be a good friend,” he said, “I sure's hell hope you're worth it.”

“What makes you say that, bud?” I asked.

“Because this single day to help out a friend is gonna cost me a lot of money, that's what,” he replied. “The only way I could shut her up was to hand her the credit card and suggest that she and our daughter go to the mall.” Mel shook his head sadly, gazing past me at the rising tide of pet hair that was threatening to break down my storm door. “This could cost me a thousand bucks! I should be happy if it stops at five hundred!”

“Aw, well,” I answered, “Chances are she'd have spent the money anyway.”

“Yeah, but not now,” Mel fired back, “I'll have school clothing to cover after this now!”

“Tell you what," I offered, "Lets go out to the garage, and you can pick any hand or power tool I own, except stuff that sits on the floor, like a table saw, and you can have that. It's not a thousand bucks but it's something. It'll make you feel at least a little better.”

Mel sniffed. “Well okay. You do have more tools than just about anyone else I know.”

So we walked around the house and up to the garage, and I raised the door.

“My God,” Mel said, “It's spotless!”

I wondered, what did he expect? This is where all my stuff is. This is my stuff. I explained that to Mel. After all, if I'm going to be able to build things and fix things, I need to be able to find my tools, right?

“But it's all your stuff now!” Mel exclaimed. “Think about that. I understand, when you're married, there's never any room in the house for your things. That's how I have it. But for you, that problem is gone!”

I shook my head. “This is still my stuff,” I replied.

“You have a brand new shop-vac,” Mel asked, “Why didn't you use that to clean up your house?”

“Beer cans," I explained. "Shop-vac hoses aren't big enough to pick up beer cans. And right now, you can't even see 'em.”

That made sense to Mel. It's why we get along. If that's the way I see it, it's okay. I do the same for him. Too bad everyone isn't like that.

So Mel settled on my circular saw, we boxed it and put it in the cab of his truck. Then we headed back to the garage to get the wheelbarrow, and a box of leaf bags for the lighter stuff. On the way out, I asked Mel, “Don't you think houses could be designed so they're harder to get dirty?”

“Oh, hell yeah," Mel chuckled, “They're called tree-houses. A flat platform with a roof over it. Dogs won't get up a vertical ladder, and women won't live in 'em. The wind sweeps the floor, and you're all good. Too bad we live in the Northeast.”

Mel is a genius.

So after about an hour we were all set up. Mel parked his pickup beside a living-room window to receive junk, we opened another window and parked a fridge carton under it to receive bags, and we blocked the back door open so we could go in and out with the wheelbarrow. By that time, about ten AM, the sky had begun to cloud over, and soon the overcast started to darken.

Mel raised one eyebrow and looked at me. “What are we gonna do if it rains? Postpone?”

“Nope,” I answered, “Today's the day.”

“Well then you're pushing the wheelbarrow.  I don't plan to get wet.”

So we started in. We discovered we could clear about two square yards with one big leaf bag, in terms of loose stuff you could pick up. I live here, but even I couldn't believe the quantity of aluminum cans we were finding. We weren't halfway across the living room and the fridge carton, which was supposed to be for bags, had reached the half-full point with cans alone. I made the hard choice and decreed everything that was loose paper to be burned outside in the burn-barrel. If we'd had to sort, it never would have gotten done. Good stuff like my contact printer and my cds were hauled temporarily to the garage for sorting and storage. If it was questionable, it went into Mel's pickup bed to be hauled to the dump. The objective was to get down to the carpet in a single day.

Soon it became obvious that we were outmatched. The pickup bed was full, the fridge carton was nearly full of cans and the floor of the single garage bay I used to park the car, was covered. And we still weren't done with the living room. “There's only one solution,” proclaimed Mel. “Build a bonfire at the far end of your property.”

“A bonfire!”

“It's either out there, or in here. Your choice.” Mel's face looked threatening.

“Well okay, Edna,” I replied.

“Who the hell's Edna?” queried Mel.

So while we walked to the other side of my property to start a bonfire, I told him about the events of the previous day. Mel thought it was hilarious, demonstrating his feelings by bending over and slapping both knees to accentuate his mirth. He was starting to piss me off. I’d been in real danger, and it just wasn't that funny.

My place is what's left of a former farm. Both my mother and dad were raised on farms, and the place appealed to me when I bought it. The seller kept the surrounding land to develop, and I got the hillside and former barnyard as my lawn. That suited me fine, but now it meant that every trip to the bonfire from the house was uphill with the wheelbarrow. The yard is kind of rolling and knobby, and the surface is not exactly smooth. I had to pick my way around the lumpy bumps to avoid being stopped cold. Worse, the acrid smoke released by the huge pile of burning paper, cardboard and pet hair kept drifting across the yard and over me, while I was trying to get there with the next load. The sky had blackened with the approach of a thunderstorm, and in the distance, bright forks of lightning seared across the sky. After each one, thunder arrived six seconds or so later. My muscles were aching from all of the two-way trips, each of which totaled about the length of a football field. I was seriously beginning to drag. The wheelbarrow tire was leaving furrows in the sod. Rain started coming as a bit more than a sprinkle. My mind began to wander, and I daydreamed.

I imagined myself wearing a helmet shaped like an inverted basin with a wide brim, a leather strap under my chin. I had both hands on the back half of a litter, carrying a wounded soldier from the battlefield, trying to make it back to the trenches after another over-the-top assault. Clouds of acrid mustard gas threatened to kill me, but I held my breath as it burned my eyes and made them tear over. I had to pick my way uphill, stepping around the mangled bodies of the gallant fallen. This man still had a chance, if I could avoid taking a bullet. The thunder and flash of artillery was everywhere. I could feel the clods of mud sticking to the bottoms of my tattered combat boots, and I was slipping and sliding, as we made our way around huge coils of rusted barbed wire and heavy wooden stakes.

Suddenly an artillery shell hit right nearby! The blinding flash and the concussion made me slip, and my head struck something hard, as I fell. Everything went dark.

***********************

I came-to with Mel slapping me on the cheek. “Hey, buddy, you alright? That one was close! But it didn't hit in the yard...what the hell happened?”

I slowly pulled myself up to a sitting position, and tried to shake my head to clear it, but shaking it made it hurt. “I don't know, man, I think I slipped.” I had hit my head on the rolled edge of the steel wheelbarrow. I looked down at my shoes, more than half-expecting to see combat boots covered with mud. Just my sneakers, with great wads of dog poop stuck to the bottoms. Guess I should have cleaned up the yard before trying to clean up the house.

The rain was coming down a little harder now, and the lightning had moved in with the storm, so we went back to the porch.

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you I held a steak on my injured head. Instead, I kicked off my crappy shoes and went inside to see what I had that was cold. Three minutes later we were parked on lawn chairs on the front porch, sipping cold beers while I held a frozen pork chop wrapped in waxed paper against my forehead. It was only two in the afternoon.

“Are we making any progress, Mel?” I asked, hopefully.

“Yeah, some. But it's gonna cost you more than the price of a power saw.”

My thoughts returned to Edna. Hah! “That's okay, Mel. Whatever you need. I'll owe you a couple. This is better than any of the alternatives.”

The local waste transfer station was only open until three on Saturdays, so Mel took his truckload and headed out. I took four aspirins for my aching head and went back out to finish dumping the wheelbarrow load onto the smoking fire, wearing a pair of high-top hikers. It was still raining, although not as steadily, and a stiff breeze had arrived, chilling me through. So I went inside to look for a dry shirt. Couldn't find a clean one, so in my wet clothes I stood in the wind that was now whipping through the house, and received a thick covering of flying pet hair. I closed the windows and walked back out into the front yard, trying to decide what to do next.

About sixty feet away was the street, and two kids were walking past. One of them noticed me, and screamed. I looked over and saw a boy and a girl, probably ages seven and eight or thereabouts, standing out there. The little girl was pointing. Then I realized what I must look like. Wet stringy hair, big reddened bump on my head, covered with brown fur at least from the neck down, and I'm all of six feet-four. To them I must have looked like a monstrous, hairy Bigfoot. Without really thinking, I turned toward them and raised both arms above my head. “WHAWW,” I roared. They took off running and screaming. I laughed, and then, and only then, did I think about the potential for consequences.

Mel returned with a big bag of burgers and fries, the sun came back out, and my head stopped throbbing. Things were beginning to look up. It seemed like we'd passed the halfway point. The bonfire was burning again quite merrily, my clothes were drying out, I'd gotten my second wind and we were down to mostly just boxes and bags. This would work out, after all. We ate and got back to it, working the same way until it got to be about six o'clock.

I've always prided myself on being able to fix things. The older upright vacuum cleaner I had would have been retired years earlier, but I'd replaced the beater bar four times, had replaced many more belts, had poked holes in the outlet filter to enhance suction, and had put oversized screws in where the old ones had rattled free. It had been working pretty well when my wife parked it. But because it was that old and had been repaired so many times, it was one of the things she didn't take. And of course, now that I could see the nap of the carpets, I was going to have to get it out.

This particular upright had been one of the more powerful vacuums when we bought it. It had a heavy grille near the bottom, and a cup, rather than a bag to collect whatever you sucked up with it. It would pick up quarters and deposit them in that cup, it was that good. Unfortunately, I could go just one foot with it in this environment and the cup would be full. So the operation required a trash bag right beside me. Vroom, stop, dump. Vroom, stop, dump. Over and over and over. Finally the living room was mostly done, and I started on the foyer.

Noticing the front porch had accumulated a lot of pet hair from the open door and windows during this operation, I decided to take the vacuum over that too. So I stepped outside, lifted the outlet cover, and plugged it in. But this time, it started up right away. I hadn't hit the switch. I worked the switch on and off but it had no effect. The switch had failed. Ah, well, no shame for it. At least I could still use it till I could find a switch that would fit.

But no sooner had I gotten to the far end of the porch, when something terrible happened. My sturdy, often-repaired vacuum cleaner began to emit a piercing scream, as the bearings in its motor passed away. I just looked at it, still holding the handle. I thought, I can't turn it off. Have to go and unplug it. As I walked back to the other end of the porch, it got louder and louder, shrieking like a thousand banshees, rattling the window glass and threatening to lift the floorboards of the porch. It hurt my ears, and as I unplugged it, I realized that the noise was still echoing from the opposite hillside. Even the echo was objectionable. That motor had spun its last. I knew it was all over, for that baby.

Just then I heard the wailing and crying of a child, and I looked all around to see where it was coming from. There, just outside the fence and along the street, stood a very angry mother with her little girl's face buried in her stomach. The woman had one arm around her daughter's shoulders, and the other one was shaking a fist in the air, obviously at me.

“Shame on you!” she shrieked. “Shame on you, scaring little children! You ever do it again, I'm calling the police!!”

Well I didn't recognize her, but it seems like new people are moving in around here every day, and it also seems like they all walk and jog this road. I just held my hands out to both sides in mock disbelief. Call the police, lady. My vacuum cleaner died. Sue me.

I could see she had Edna potential. A few years, just a few more Twinkies, she'll get there.

Cut to about a week later. Mel's wife had come and yelled at him because it was nearly eight in the evening, and he'd gone home. The fire had burned down, and on Sunday afternoon I'd picked up a new vacuum to finish the job. The dogs had pranced around like they were in a new house. I wouldn't be able to park in the garage until I had sorted and boxed my treasures for storage. The cash from recycling all those aluminum cans had nearly covered the cost of replacing my high-end circular saw. And now, there was no reason not to entertain.

It was the first Friday night poker game I'd hosted in a couple of years. There were seven of us. A bluish haze of cigar smoke filled the kitchen, and everybody seemed glad to be back. Mel was re-telling the Edna story, and his brother Fred interjected that he knew about her.

“Edna! The four hundred pound, dominatrix nympho? She was here?” Fred exclaimed.

Dominatrix! Nympho! How would anyone know that, unless...never mind. I can't handle any more images. I was 'way beyond creeped-out, and I said so. Everyone was laughing except for Eric, the youngest among us. Eric is perhaps thirty-six. He seemed to be completely attentive to Mel's tale.

We wrapped it up at about two AM, and Eric sidled up to me as he was about to leave. “Could I have the name of that cleaning service?” he asked.

Sure, why not. Only Mel was still hanging around, and he heard the exchange.

As he prepared to leave, Mel smirked and remarked, “I'll bet he's gonna hook up with Edna.”

I just stared. “Surely not.”

“Yeah, Eric's a little weird,” he said. “There's someone for everybody. Even you.”

Mel laughed and slapped me on the back as he walked out the door.

Obviously my perceptions of “someone” and “everybody” are overdue for an adjustment. I am getting older, no question about it. But Edna, and Eric! No way!

Over in the corner of the kitchen, my new vacuum cleaner stood. I'd found the same model. I know how to fix it and it had always done well, so I just got another one. Same dust cup, same grille.

Of course I'd been drinking, and I was also pretty tired. Absent-mindedly, I addressed the vacuum cleaner. “Are you gonna get cranky, old and ugly too, like the rest of us?”

I could have sworn I saw both ends of its grille turn upward in a wry smile.

***************

Copyright Benjamin Trayne 2013/2023