A recent post by Fran, at Being Me, hit a familiar
note for me. She writes of her hall carpet and the demands it makes on her
time.
I too thought
a dark blue carpet would be a great idea. How could something the shade of
indigo show dirt? And I was right. In all the years that I had it, it appeared
grime free. For all we knew, there was enough soil lurking deep in our rug’s lush
roots to re-sod the entire Oklahoma
dust bowl.
What I hadn’t
factored in was my orange cat, or the fact the woman of the house (who shall
remain nameless) also has shedding tendencies. There was also the day-to-day
traffic back and forth through the house and to the upstairs, trailing string,
threads, and whatever else failed to fall off in the kitchen on the way.
Then there’s the fact that the
carpet was the path to the laundry area in the basement, the household lint
headquarters. On banner days, a forgotten tissue would transform in the wash
into flakes of confetti that would drift down merrily behind us as we carried
our baskets upstairs.
On the plus side, one year when I
was painting the front door the same shade, I spilled the entire can and
no one was the wiser. ( When home projects bring on the blues )
The rug’s superhuman Magneto-like
grip on the flotsam and jetsam of our lives drove me at first to kneel on the
floor and scrub with the small hand attachment on my vacuum. That lost its charm pretty
quickly and next came a massive – and expensive - upright vac so powerful that
for safety I put the cats outside when I used it.
After 15 or so years of dealing
with either constant vacuuming or living with a floor crosshatched with lint,
fibers, and string, the final irony was that when we moved this year, we pulled
the whole thing up to lure buyers with the pristine hardwood floors beneath.
