Clean

It takes so much to keep a house clean, especially one this size and with so many creatures living in it...

I spent three hours of my afternoon just working on the carpets, vacuuming and running the steam cleaner, but it needed to be done, and as always, I feel great satisfaction with the results.  I still have to do laundry tomorrow and the kitchen is a total wreck, but laundry isn't hard, and I'll put on some loud music while I wash up all those pots and pans and empty and reload the dishwasher, so it will get done.

I washed all my bed linens including the comforter and put my feather mattress out to sun today all day.  It's remade and waiting for a clean me, the last chore of my day, to slide into it.  The feeling of a freshly fluffed and sunned feather mattress settling around me is one of my favorite sensations (if a dog hasn't beaten me to it and flattened it out already).

I don't much like doing housework, it's true, but I like the results of it.  I think maybe if there wasn't so MUCH of it to do here, I'd feel differently.  I never get caught up here.  In my little apaato in Japan, I could get up on a Saturday morning and clean the whole thing, fixtures, floors, kitchen, laundry, everything in the time it took me to do just the carpets here.

And yet, for all that this house means family, history, so much to me.  I suppose it's a tradeoff.  I know if I were designing a new house, planning one from the ground up, many things in structure would change. I carry the plans for one around in my head, and many of its elements are more or less designed with ease of living in mind.

It's time now to go get myself cleaned up and put into that fresh bed.  I'll close up all my windows and turn off my attic fan and enjoy a little island of order in the sea of chaos.