Guerilla Cleaning

      Nothing like having three chapters sent back to you by your editor to be re-worked to drive a person to other pursuits. 

Some of the benefits of manic pre-Thanksgiving organizing and planning (anyone need to launch an allied landing at Normandy? I’m your girl) are that not only am I maintaining my usual low reptilian-like blood pressure before I have to feed fifteen people and house an extra seven, I have time to drift about and do projects around the house, guerrilla style.

What is guerrilla cleaning, you ask? These are my most successful projects – you know, the ones where one minute you’re looking for a pair of shoes and suddenly you’ve emptied your closet and are now vacuuming the floor.

One well-used expression in our family when I was growing up was, “A little dirt never hurt anyone,” so cleaning is not necessarily a natural activity for me.

If I don’t get up that morning thinking, “Today I’ll clean the oven,” I don’t mind it so much that by 10 am I’m on my hands and knees spraying Easy-Off.

Since I can’t do much more about Thanksgiving between now and Wednesday, I’ve wandered into several useful undertakings.

Yesterday I changed sheets as usual and did some laundry, nothing out of the ordinary for a Sunday. But then a few moments too many in the basement found me reorganizing the canned and dry goods down there, stacking and sorting and discarding a few things whose expiration dates bothered even me.

I can’t even recall the events that led up to it, but an hour later I was rubbing deglosser on the chipped sections of my kitchen cabinets. Many years ago, shortly after we moved here, we painted over the knotty pine cabinets and bought new doors. The transformation was satisfying, but the paint has been dinged here and there over time. I unearthed the old paint, miraculously it was still good, and I was off and running.

Today all I had on my agenda was making oatmeal cookies. I swear I put the butter out to soften on the counter in my chip-free kitchen, but the next minute I had my patient husband helping me wrestle our behemoth of a fridge away from the wall.  Soon I was lying on the floor vacuuming the really noteworthy accumulation of cat hair and dust bunnies from the coils. We should save enough in electricity now to take that cruise.

But I still got the cookies made, just in time for an afternoon snack.