CLEANING IT UP

 

Sometimes I find myself looking for a new subject for my blog but inevitably one will drop in my lap and make me wonder why I didn’t talk about it already. I want to thank my sister-in-law, Linda, for helping me out and hope she knows she really did. One day she called and asked “What are you doing?”  “Cleaning up,” I said. “How?” she asked. So I realized that even those who have known us blind folks forever sometimes have to stop and wonder things.

When I attended the Governor Morehead School in the 1950’s, we had maids to clean our rooms and bathrooms. It is a little amazing that we were really not taught some things. However, when I attended the Rehabilitation Center for the Blind in the 1960’s. While thinking I was there to merely wait for a place in a class to open up at Duke Medical Center where I would begin my career path, I found myself being put in a class called demands of daily living, and another one called laundry. These classes were taught by totally blind people. Laundry? I thought. I’ve been doing my own laundry since being twelve years old. It was the ironing that opened my eyes (so to speak). At that time creases in pants were a MUST. It never occurred to me that if you line up those in-seams the creases perfectly line up, front and back, and last at least until somebody sits down? And then there were those shirt sleeves that always must be rolled up to be in style. Rolling them up and ironing them that way really helped them not start falling down just about the time a young man knocked on the door of his girlfriend’s house. That’s when young men really did do that. Cleaning bathrooms! No fun for any person, perhaps more not fun for a blind person. Yet we were given instructions on brushes, cleansers, scrubbing, mopping, making sure things like the tops of tiles around a shower or rims around the top of a tub  were always dried off or either wiped off when cleaning. We learned to touch most surfaces because it might look clean, but it needed to FEEL clean as well. We had been making hospital tucks in our sheets for like ever, yet learned to fold the corner of that bottom sheet backwards over one hand so it would slip right over that corner easier, most of the time anyway. We learned to put our hand inside a plastic bag, lay it over a pile of anything such as spilled ravioli in one spot or pick up the mess a dog makes from the carpet or outdoors. We learned to be careful if we took the broom to knock down spider webs not to knocked down a picture instead. Those are just a few things we hopefully learned; here are more things I found out once I became married and had children.

Sweeping works better for me barefooted.       

I never could get those hard water stains out of the tub because I had no idea there was such a thing. I think they have cleaners that work better these days, but I have a fiberglass tub which is easier to clean, although I’d surely like to have one of those fancy showers you see advertised on TV for older people.

I cannot get soot off the walls, well, maybe I could if I realized it was there.

Sometimes there might be a stain on the cabinet top that is totally unfeelable. I just wait for somebody to let me know I missed it.

Then there’s this air return vent up so high over my hallway door that it fills up with lent. Finally, after my X husband’s new wife informed me how bad it looked, I bought a long handled mop to reach it. Is there a way to show a tongue sticking out on the computer?

Once I began keeping my grandchildren for my own children to work, I also worked at home, so I hired a cleaning lady, truly a joy in my life! Sometimes she thought there was a problem I didn’t see because I was blind, however, there were times I certainly knew it was there, just waited for her to deal with it. I must admit how great it was to know I didn’t have to be embarrassed for people to see anything amiss and think “poor thing didn’t see it.”

  Streaking windows and doors plagues me to this day! Why can’t somebody invent glass that just won’t streak? I now have a new cleaner guaranteed not to streak; I’ll let you know as soon as somebody tells me I streaked my front storm door.

Now, last week when I was in Lexington I took everything off Mom’s bottom shelves on every table in her living room and dusted it thoroughly. I told her there were Bibles and papers that would take somebody ten years to sort out when she moves to heaven some day. I put everything back, except this one picture of my brother and sister-in-law, which I put back upside down. I didn’t do it on purpose, Linda, honest.