Saturday has always been housekeeping day at Chez Roommate.
It surprises a lot of people to learn I don’t mind house cleaning; in fact, I sort of enjoy the process. On Saturdays it takes me about 4 hours to do the whole house including laundry, excluding windows.
Reiko is OK with the usual Saturday chores. Perhaps a mild existential resignation. She doesn’t mind the vacuum cleaner because she cannot hear it. She seems a little concerned when I mention that she looks like a large dust mop.
She is definitely not thrilled when I mop the tile areas with a vinegar solution. “Look, DogDad, I like pasta salad as much as the next dog, but we don’t have to put it on the floor.”
Mopping tile with a vinegar solution is a real old time trick. (“Olde Tyme” in expensive neighborhoods) I doubt many guys do that.
That got me to thinking about men who do housekeeping. In my experience, most male housekeepers fall into two categories: totally useless and really good. There’s little middle ground.
I learned how to do my chores from old biddies. Seriously. It was the old ladies in the family who considered little kid me as free labor and would gladly deploy me, bucket and mop in hand, to make things shine.
It’s funny, when the AJF and I first married, she thought it was absolutely unacceptable that the man of the house would do something so menial as scrub the tub and toilet. She believed 900 years of ancestors were figuratively slicing their bellies with super sharp swords in shame. That was one of the few battles that I won…or was surrender a clever strategy after all? Hmmm.
Anyway, since I’m an early bird, I finished the cleaning before 10:00 and will now move on to washing the car.
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