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Bucketsful.
Apr. 8th, 2002 12:24 amIt takes a few bucketfuls of hot, aromatic water to clean hardwood floors. For every time that you push the mop, you may leave a spongey imprint of water and hair and detritus in a squishy-looking bar-shaped line across the section you just went over, and that's no good.
Like most things in life worth doing well, it pays and serves to do them well a few times over - I remember learning cursive writing in grade school through some workbook called D'Nealian. Over and over in the large margins, dotted line at the halfway mark for crossed t's and f's, for the tops of lowercase s's and the humps of n's and m's, the repetition, the rubbing out of messy lettering with grubby blackened erasers, the pencil nub tracing over the printed black of letters that seemed sanitized. They seemed to have been written by a woman with slender hands and a tasteful golden watch, lipstick in a pale coral, legs crossed at the ankle, pumps to match her dress. She formed the letters and I followed them dutifully until high school, where I dumped D'Nealian for my friend Bridget Murphy's tightly-laced bubbly letters and consistency.
Even later, I developed my own style, a very artistic, expressionistic, not-always-legible flourishy thing that has stayed with me to this day. But I still use D'Nealian in spite of it all, my hand trained to follow the course of G-rated r's and capital Q's, loops perfect and falling into the same place every time.
For a girl with no religion, you have to understand, these things are my comfort.
But I was talking about mopping.
Hot water. Lots of hot water. It should be the kind of hot where the mop runs across the floor in an antiseptic swoop, leaving steam trails behind. You can move the bucket as you work your way across the floor, and the circle of warmth left behind can be felt by your feet, even in normal shoes. Use Murphy's Oil Soap.
Eventually this repetition and washing of flat floors brings on some kind of ripple effect, and soon the rest of the house will begin to gleam and glow, in spite of yourself. The high points in your cheeks will be pink, your thoughts will quiet down and settle into more normal patterns. Your neural runways will be clear, or at least running a little more smoothly.
Maybe I am making too much of mopping. Perhaps I should think more about what's happening in the world today. Perhaps I should blog about which side I am on, and why. Maybe I should try to be more edgy, more compelling, dive into the world of the living and the cyber, and stay there for a while.
These hardwood floors call to me, though. They are soap-scented and clean, they support me and hold me and they are there, gleaming in the afternoon sunshine. I can invite people over and they will sit on these floors, with board games and CDs and books spread around them.
I'm just rambling, here. (Talk about the value of repetition -- I am repeatedly rambling on about this kind of thing. It's therapeutic.)
Like most things in life worth doing well, it pays and serves to do them well a few times over - I remember learning cursive writing in grade school through some workbook called D'Nealian. Over and over in the large margins, dotted line at the halfway mark for crossed t's and f's, for the tops of lowercase s's and the humps of n's and m's, the repetition, the rubbing out of messy lettering with grubby blackened erasers, the pencil nub tracing over the printed black of letters that seemed sanitized. They seemed to have been written by a woman with slender hands and a tasteful golden watch, lipstick in a pale coral, legs crossed at the ankle, pumps to match her dress. She formed the letters and I followed them dutifully until high school, where I dumped D'Nealian for my friend Bridget Murphy's tightly-laced bubbly letters and consistency.
Even later, I developed my own style, a very artistic, expressionistic, not-always-legible flourishy thing that has stayed with me to this day. But I still use D'Nealian in spite of it all, my hand trained to follow the course of G-rated r's and capital Q's, loops perfect and falling into the same place every time.
For a girl with no religion, you have to understand, these things are my comfort.
But I was talking about mopping.
Hot water. Lots of hot water. It should be the kind of hot where the mop runs across the floor in an antiseptic swoop, leaving steam trails behind. You can move the bucket as you work your way across the floor, and the circle of warmth left behind can be felt by your feet, even in normal shoes. Use Murphy's Oil Soap.
Eventually this repetition and washing of flat floors brings on some kind of ripple effect, and soon the rest of the house will begin to gleam and glow, in spite of yourself. The high points in your cheeks will be pink, your thoughts will quiet down and settle into more normal patterns. Your neural runways will be clear, or at least running a little more smoothly.
Maybe I am making too much of mopping. Perhaps I should think more about what's happening in the world today. Perhaps I should blog about which side I am on, and why. Maybe I should try to be more edgy, more compelling, dive into the world of the living and the cyber, and stay there for a while.
These hardwood floors call to me, though. They are soap-scented and clean, they support me and hold me and they are there, gleaming in the afternoon sunshine. I can invite people over and they will sit on these floors, with board games and CDs and books spread around them.
I'm just rambling, here. (Talk about the value of repetition -- I am repeatedly rambling on about this kind of thing. It's therapeutic.)
