Tag: household chores

Sniffingly a homemaker

Walking through Target tonight, I found myself moving in a sort of comfortable, meditative state… It was late, and I was rather tired from the day… I took several times over the usual time it takes me to obtain an equal number and variety of items at the store… and I somehow didn’t mind it…  I guess this just supports my theory that I secretly – read ‘subconsciously’ – want to be a homemaker-housewife.  When I first moved into my own apartment several years ago, and then again in Japan (when I had to start from, basically, scratch), I felt a certain flow of mental chemicals that delighted me through and through, in a comfortable, this is where I belong sort of way whenever I was shopping for apartment-related items, house items.  And it isn’t to say that I belong only as a homemaker or anything, but simply that it is somewhere of many somewheres where I do belong.

Tonight was no exception.  I moved into a new home and with a new person yesterday, you see.  She has most everything that goes in a house, and I have very little of that sort of stuff, so the match-up is rather good on that front (not to mention that we actually get along really well in the first place, because that isn’t the point).  However, my whole OCD compulsions have me need my own cleaning supplies. —You see, it isn’t enough just to have cleaning supplies.  They must also be nice to the planet, nice to the nose and eyes, and themselves clean (their containers), while kept in a clean space.  Show me a bottle of cleaner that has been under a cabinet and has a thin layer of dust on it, and I won’t even touch it until you have cleaned the bottle.  I probably also with have slight inner daytime terrors of the fact that the bottle is dirty.  Anyway, back to the main point of this all… —-  So, I was at Target, seeking out these cleaning supplies for me for my new home.

I walked calmly, despite the inward thought of how late it must be.  I felt confidence every time I set down the basket and gave a once-over to a certain type of product.  I gracefully selected bottles whose scents I wanted to test, and euphorically sampled their natural essential oil-filled smells.  I smiled at each, and even mmm-ed a few, closing my eyes to embrace the scent.  I usually take my time with scents – I even stop to smell flowers much more often than is common, just to smell them and to indulge myself.  It’s alway sa bit of a bummer whenever I find flower bunches at stores that don’t even smell (or don’t smell good).  Whole Foods is one of those stores.

Anyway, so I take my time with (good) smells, enjoying them, allowing my brain to do any work it feels appropriate whenever it crosses a familiar scent.  I was told when I was quite young that scent was the strongest sense for recalling memory, and I’ve always kept that in mind for some reason, delighting in the silly scents that bring back memories.  (Like how the hand soap in this one bathroom in the house where I once nannied smelled like my grandmother on my dad’s side.  She hadn’t been alive for years at that point, and yet I had no doubt that it was the same smell that was usually on her, though I never seemed consciously to have noticed her having a specific scent before that moment.)

So, I was smelling slowly and comfortably, and enjoying all the familiar and new scents.  One in particular, though I definitely didn’t want it as a cleaning supply, was the replication of some regular smell from some point in my childhood.  I took a picture and sent it to my mom, telling her to go find one and to sniff it, so she could help me figure out why the scent is so specifically familiar.  It was labeled as being scented “radish”, however it was not merely the scent of radishes that was familiar – it was that specific combination.  Perhaps my mother had used that cleaning supply brand and scent at some point.  Though, I’m not too sure of that being very likely, because it seems to be a newer scent from this brand, and because it relates to a specific summer-type memory for me, as opposed to just lots of childhood cleaning days.  I’m looking forward to figuring out that one.  It might take me a little while, a few months’ even, but I am confident that, as with others in the past, I will figure it out.

Post-a-day 2018

 

Okinawa, but actually Baseboards

Okay, today was, put simply, an amazing day for me.  I stood up for myself against myself and social pressures and blah-di-blah-blah, I wandered about, I found amazing things, and I never even made it to my intended destination.  And it was fabulous.

However, I’ll not write about all of that tonight.  I’m on my phone, and I find it cumbersome and somewhat annoying to write a lot on my phone, so I’ll wait until Monday or Tuesday, when I have my computer to use.  Don’t worry, though, I took lots of pictures to remind me of what all I did today (a bit different for me, huh?), so those will help me write it all up rather accurately later on!  

Instead, tonight I will write about baseboards.

As I was showering just now, here in the Air BnB, I started wondering about how they manage cleaning of the place between visitors.  Naturally, I cut off that line of thinking almost instantly (because, of you know anything about me and cleanliness, you know I have super-mental-OCD when it comes to bathroom-related cleanliness).  However, it reminded me of dirty I have found places to be in Japan.

Now, when I say that I find places here dirty, it doesn’t mean that Japan is generally gross all over the place – the average person likely wouldn’t notice a thing, except on the odd occasion.  I mean things like door handles, hand towels, and all sorts of other little everyday things.  Things like baseboards, for example.

I never thought much about baseboards (aside from ‘kicking the baseboard’ at the end of an outside turn in two-step (the partner dance, not the song that says it over and over again)) until I was visiting my high school boyfriend’s house one day.  They were finishing with cleaning day at their house when I arrived, and his mom was assigning the final chores to him and his siblings.

“Do you want to vacuum, or do the baseboards?” she asked him.

I think he picked the vacuuming, but I’m not sure.  I asked what she’d meant by “the baseboards”, and someone explained that it was running a wet paper towel or rag along all of the baseboards in the house, in order to get and keep them clean.  I got to watch one of his siblings (perhaps it was his middle sister) then do just that, going along quickly on her knees, cleaning the baseboards.

After that, I began to wonder how my family’s baseboards stayed clean, seeing as I had never noticed anyone cleaning them in any way, and certainly not in the way my boyfriend’s family did it.  I think I never asked anyone about this, but merely wondered privately what magic was at work.

Unfortunately, though, this opened me up to a whole new world of cleaning and cleanliness.  As if I hadn’t already had enough criteria for what determined a place’s (and its residents’) cleanliness, I now had this new one called “baseboards”.  Everywhere I went, of baseboards were in view, I was suddenly aware of how clean they were.

Nowadays, it has calmed down a bit, as it is no longer a new concept for me.  However, I still notice them (and judge places and people by their cleanliness, of course).  In Japan, they have often been unclean, sometimes even layered up with dirt and dust bunnies.  (Actually, there is an extreme amount of dust bunnies at my schools – I don’t understand how they all develop, not why so many of them have to end up right by my desk, of all places.)  And, every time I find these baseboards, two thoughts occur for me.  Okay, well three. 

1) Gross.

2) I want to leave now.

3) They need to get in board with John’s mom on this one. 

(John is the old high school boyfriend, in case you didn’t gather that.)

And, since so many have proven unclean here, I’ve actually taken to avoiding looking at them.  I hardly have I think about it anymore, I just realized – I simply don’t look at them.  Thus I am able to maintain one small piece of this sanity a good handful of people in the world believe that I truly do have. 😛

So,… go check out cleaning your baseboards, kay?  Or not.  Just don’t invite me over, if you haven’t checked them and can guarantee their cleanliness. 😛
Post-a-day 2017