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CleaningDecember 10, 2005 Cleaning house is a handy method of procrastination, but otherwise it's such a waste of time. Really: dusting, scrubbing, and vacuuming when you could be writing, walking, reading, riding . . . ? At some point, however, the grunge starts getting to me. Papers, magazines, and books drift to the bottom of their respective heaps and elude pursuers. Sometimes they swap heaps and get really lost. So I clean the apartment thoroughly twice a year, spring and fall. Not all at once, mind you. I pick a place to start and then move clockwise or counterclockwise around my two rooms, spending 30 or 45 minutes on each section until the whole place is done. It takes about two weeks. Often the starting place picks me. I hadn't balanced my checkbook since the end of June. When one's bank balance occasionally drops into double or even single digits, this is risky behavior. As the Fall of Working Excessively wore on, I promised my checkbook that I would attend to it soon. "Soon" turned out to be this morning. First, however, I had to extricate my bank statements from the magazine rack that serves as my hall table. Pretty soon I was sorting through the piles of magazines, catalogues, receipts, mail, and other stuff on all four shelves, then I was shaking out the woven wall-hanging just above, dusting the door jambs, and dragging out the vacuum cleaner to dispose of the cobwebs (horrors!) that I spotted while dusting the door jambs. The vacuum cleaner wasn't sucking properly, so I peered into its tubes and discovered that one end was jammed solid with dog hair. After failing to pry it out with a pencil, a screwdriver, and a pica stick, I untwisted a wire hanger and made like a plumber unclogging a clogged drain. That worked. Now you understand why I wasn't done with my checkbook until quarter of one. At the barn it was more of the same. Nearly gale-force winds blew through yesterday afternoon, leaving hay bits and shavings all over the tack and grain rooms. Sweeping the grain room meant putting the new canned cat food away, banishing empty containers to the hayloft, taking out four grain bags' worth of trash, and making up grain for tonight and tomorrow. My reward was a ride through the woods, accompanied by Rhodry (who, bless him, didn't find any deer parts). Despite the recent weather, the footing was good; the ground wasn't frozen, and the only ice was around the big puddles in the Old Holmes Hole Road. We rode through a sunset that spread and deepened with every passing minute: bare black trees against dark royal blues, fiery yellows, glowing peach-orange-pinks. This evening I went to work on one of the big bookshelves. Done. One of these days I'll get to the disorderly corner I call my office. Not tonight, though. Probably not tomorrow either.
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