Two weeks without my usual routine of keeping Josie two or three days every week and time was weighing so heavily on my hands that yesterday I found myself cleaning baseboards and applying Liquid Gold to the wainscoting and furniture.
An unhappy side effect of this isolation thing is that we don't have friends over to dinner. And having folks over used to send us into a frenzy of cleaning and cooking. We counted on this impetus to keep the house in reasonable shape. Now, a perfunctory bit of vacuuming when the dog hair begins to float about and some equally perfunctory dusting have been the norm. With predictable results. Also there is an appalling amount of mildew, what with the wet weather we've been having. So it was time.
The thing about baseboards is they're way down there. My back will only put up with a limited amount of that kid of bending so I do my baseboard cleaning the same way I weed the garden--sit and scoot. It's very silly looking and the getting back up part isn't pretty. But the house is beginning to be cleaner--once you get started on an endeavor like this, the clean stuff just highlights what else needs attention. Josie and her support staff are coming for Family Dinner Up tonight and starting Monday, we'll be back to what passes for normal--with me doing the voices for her animals and pretending to be another three-year-old playing in The Room. Pancakes and tea parties and a new fantasy figure from Aunt Fay--and for a day I can ignore those baseboards that haven't yet been cleaned.
