(07) clean houses

This is what I spent my day doing: putting things away (into their places, or else finding new places for them), organizing, dusting (including the blinds and the ceiling fans and the walls, which if you live in a century-old house with pets, you will believe me when I confirm that yes, the walls do need to be dusted), mopping, scrubbing, washing, until now at nine-thirty at night, my house is well underway to being as clean as I can make it. My mother would say, with perfect truth, that this is not actually all that clean, but people! I am doing my best here!

I still have some rooms left, some things that need to be done, but I am finished for the day, and I'm sitting in my fresh-scented, reasonably dust-free study writing this and sipping at a too-hot cup of chai, and it makes me happy, not the cleaning, which will God help me never not be a fucking chore of the highest possible order of magnitude, but this moment right here, at the first pause for breath before I'm all overrun by entropy again, looking around and knowing it'll be going to hell but soonest, and I know that I won't make any but the most halfhearted, negligent attempts to stop it happening until I'm forced to spend another two full days of my life wrangling it back into my grip again, but right now, right now it is beautiful.