Fourth of July, housewife style

Aron had the Fourth of July totally off—no work, no school—so we started the day with a family trip to Starbucks, where Aron works, to get coffee, coffee for free. And then we sat on a blanket on the grassy part of campus and tried, successfully, to keep Graham from eating bugs and leaves.

At Starbucks I ordered a grande iced coffee with two shots of espresso, which partly explains the cleaning frenzy I embarked on once we returned home from our morning outing. The other part of the cleaning frenzy explanation is that Aron's being home meant that he could lie down with Graham for his morning nap. I generally enjoy being immobilized by a sleeping baby. Nearly every blog I write is typed with one hand while Graham naps on top of me—that's how this one is being composed right now, but it'll be edited only once I have the opportunity to sit upright, a position from which I am better able to detect errors, which there are invariably many of when I type with one hand while reclined. Yesterday, Aron was the one immobilized by a napping Graham. While Graham napped, Aron watched the beginning of an Italian movie, and I cleaned the bathroom.

Aron is the least lazy man I've ever known. He's not just not lazy—he is almost hyperactive domestically. He enjoys cooking, and he even enjoys cleaning up after the meals he prepares. He is practically the sole laundry folder of the house. We have a fairly large backyard but no lawnmower, so Aron uses a weedwacker to cut the grass, a task that takes about three hours. I wanted to mention Aron's willing, uncomplaining domesticity in case the fact that he watched a movie while I cleaned our bathroom made it sound as if I was suggesting that he's bummy. Graham has to have a nap buddy, and Aron gave me a very welcome break from being that buddy.

And I spent that break cleaning the toilet.

When you're pregnant, parent-people like to tell you uplifting things about shit, like that your baby's won't gross you out. They're not lying. It stinks and is sticky and will surely make it onto your shirt one day, but there's something magically neutral about your own child's poo. I can't explain it. When I take Jeffery to the dog park and have to clean up after him, I gag and retch and feel sometimes on the verge of crying—that's how grossed out I am about poopy. But Graham's poo has more than once somehow gotten under my fingernails—I wasn't pleased about it, but I wasn't horrified. 

How I feel about cleaning a toilet more closely resembles the way I feel about Jeffery's poo than the way I feel about Graham's. Cleaning a toilet is a horrific experience. Ray Bradbury has a line of writerly wisdom that I repeat to myself during my rare attempts to create a story out of words; Bradbury advises writers thus:  "Don't think—just write. Thinking is the enemy of creativity." The line can be modified to apply equally well to housewife chores. "Don't think—just clean. Thinking is the enemy of cleaning." 

It was important to avoid thinking as I cleaned the bathroom not only because the reasons the toilet gets dirty make me want to yak—it was also important to banish rational thoughts because they would've prevented me from sweeping the floor and the corners of the bathroom, where spiders have built homes. As I've mentioned before—I’ve mentioned it twice before, and this makes three times—we live with spiders. I don't know why I keep bringing it up. It's relevant to the story of cleaning the bathroom, but it's also an avoidable detail:  I could've said that the bathroom was dusty without explaining that the dust in the bathroom is the sort that spiders make as they build themselves home. Maybe I keep mentioning the spiders we live with because if you care enough about me and my family to read my blog, then you may also care enough to one day visit our home, and I don't want you to be alarmed upon your arrival to catch sight of cobwebs in the corner, and I also don't want you to think it's because I've been negligent in my housewife duties that the webs are there. The webs are there because they are the homes of harmless critters. A family of hornets has stationed itself on the right end of our porch, and many family visitors have offered to return with spray on their next visit so that we overwhelm the hornets with poison. We don't do that. We just use the other side of the porch.

But for aesthetics' sake, because I was sick of seeing a mess of webs, I swept the floor and lower corners of our bathroom yesterday, and in the process I destroyed some spider homes. Aron thinks they'll have no trouble rebuilding, and I hope both that he's right and that they'll rebuild in the upper corners, which are higher than my eyes have the habit of looking. 

Friends, I'm not only a housewife—I am also an entrepreneur. I am the proprietor of an Amazon account that I call Hall's Books. When Aron and I moved into together we had several of the same books, so we donated the duplicates to a local bookstore that has since, and sadly, gone out of business. We've also donated a few dozen books to thrift stores. It's rare that we feel willing to get rid of a book, because it's often that I think of a line from a book and feel strongly compelled to return to the book in question and reread, at the very least, many pages ahead of and behind the line. If I no longer had the book, I feel sure that some sort of panic would set it. But like I said, we have been known to give books away. During this most financially desperate summer of my adult life, however, I have turned to selling books on Amazon. In the last week I have sold two books, earning close to thirty dollars. (The books we sold are both sociology anthologies—we aren't wild about anthologies for some reason, and sociology, Aron's second major, doesn't thrill me either. I am particularly unconvinced by the latent/manifest content duality.) Anyway, it's because Hall's Book made thirty dollars that Aron and I allowed ourselves a bottle of wine for the Fourth of July. And that's the Fourth of July housewife style:  cleaning and wine-drinking.