By my 1/3 visit to a new client’s house, her fitness had visibly plummeted. “Most cancers don’t supply me tons of time,” she’d drop into our communique, her shoulders slumping. No response ever felt right, so I reflected her sage nods, grievously agreeing. Yet her shirts have been nevertheless starched.
I’d been operating as a maid for six months by then, scrambling to help myself and my daughter, Mia, who was about to turn three. My schedule became sparse, however, varied, and one I’d familiarized gratefully after handing out limitless résumés within the small Skagit Valley farming community where we lived, north of Seattle.
The activity paid $9 an hour, and the provider I labored for required us to get down on our knees and scrub bathrooms through the hand. No bathroom brushes, just powdered cleaner, gloves, and a rag. This was not the paintings I had envisioned myself doing at age 32. I planned to go to university and perhaps emerge as a writer. But it changed into work I could do, that I could be paid to do, that permitted me to fill the fuel tank, barely pay our $550-a-month lease, and continue to exist off the $two hundred or so a month in meal stamps we obtained to pay for our groceries.
Usually, my customers weren’t domestic while I was operating. But I appreciated it after they were and when they made eye contact. That made my experience; I wasn’t a few ghosts drifting into their lives to shine them up and make them perfect before going domestic to the small studio apartment I could barely afford to keep.
When I arrived, this new patron’s house became so clean that I was stressed about paying for my work there. Sometimes, she made me lunch when I finished cleaning the kitchen, insisting I sit with her at the dining room desk. We’d share memories about our kids simultaneously as we ate tuna sandwiches on white bread, cut into triangles, with carrot sticks on the side. She immediately served espresso that we’d sip out of teacups, with cream and sugar packets and a silver spoon for stirring. It felt like tea events I’d pretended to have with my grandma when I became a child, and I informed her so. She smiled, then waved her hand to comb it off. “It’s precise to apply the flamboyant teacups while you still can,” she stated.
Her house was clean compared with my others. I wiped down the counters, cupboards, and ground, dusted and vacuumed, and cleaned the half-bathroom downstairs. Despite her contamination, she insisted on doing the one upstairs herself.
One afternoon, we were given to speaking, and she motioned for me to follow her upstairs, past the mechanical seat she used on her “horrific days,” as she referred to them. Besides, I hadn’t been upstairs several times to vacuum the stairs. When she opened the door to the visitor’s bedroom, mild flooded into the hallway.
Dozens of shoe, plastic, and rubber containers coated the partitions. More excellent containers were balanced in stacks on a pinnacle of the bed. She sighed.
“I’ve been looking to sort things into piles of what is going where,” she said. “Because of the most cancers.” I nodded and checked out the entirety she was doing. “Most matters for my son are in the storage — the gear and all of that. But my nieces and nephews and their kids will want loads of this.” I admired her as she pointed to the piles, telling me what could be received by whom. While running as a maid, I’d seen various decluttering tasks — garages parceled out iidance for yard income or downsizing. But this wasn’t the same form of venture. This was an afterlife project.