Member-only story
Making a Clean Sweep
How sweeping compound has changed my life
One of the ways in which life has changed since I was a child is the number of pets people have, and particularly the number of those pets who live in the house.
I am among that number of people with pets in the house , and as such, I have spent years looking for a solution to what I think of as “my sweeping problem.”
At times I feel that I have single handedly kept the floorcare business afloat. I have a Dyson pet hair vacuum, a Shop Vac, a Roomba, two indoor brooms, two outdoor brooms, two dust mops — one, a fluffy e-cloth; the other having bright green “microfiber” fingers — and, finally, a Swiffer.
You might think that with this formidable artillery of floor cleaning devices at my disposal, I would have some of the cleanest floors around, but alas, all my floor cleaning accoutrements are no match for the fur, dander, and dust generated by my dog, Clooney, and my cat, Stripes.
In addition to Clooney’s Olympic level shedding prowess, he requires two walks a day which, while it allows him to do some of his shedding outdoors, results in the two of us bringing in more dirt and pollen than would otherwise end up in the house.
Then there is the cat, Stripes. Except for occasional forays onto the side patio when I am hanging up laundry, she lives exclusively indoors and likes to do most of her shedding on the furniture. Still large clumps of her coat float on the air and find their way to all parts of the house.
So as hard as I try, my efforts to have clean floors are a battle I have generally lost. That is, until recently.
A dream state
I have a class of memories that are nothing more than a single visual image with no context to give them any meaning.
In one memory, I see a single stuffed animal on a kind of end table with a lamp that is on. There is nothing more to the memory, but I know from my mother that the memory is tied to something I did as a toddler that involved a late night/early morning foray into the kitchen where I helped myself to cookies in the cookie jar.
In another, I am on a horse, but in this memory, as in the other, I am not on the horse, I…
