Thursday, September 4, 2008

CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO.....

Last week when I was at Mama Bore’s house, I uncapped a bottle of white-grape water I’d just purchased at Dollar General, and it erupted everywhere…I thought mainly on my t-shirt and the newspaper I was reading, but Mom also discovered the kitchen floor was a sticky victim. She dragged out a mop, filled a bucket with soapy water and proceeded to clean up after me, cheerfully refusing my assistance, which I think she feared would just create more problems.

Later, when she was relating my "mess-capade" to my big sis, they got a nice laugh at how I hadn’t changed over the years. Old habits die hard. Growing up, I was the slob child. My sister was a neat freak, forever cleaning the room she was forced to share with me, and Beans was meticulous about his appearance. He refused to wear the same outfit twice in a row unless it’d been laundered in between wearings. Me…my clothes either got “hung” on the door knob or stuffed under the bed for another day or two or three.

Having neat-niks for siblings was a big disadvantage because yours truly was always getting the blame, rightly, for disasters left behind. This was often in the form of a sticky refrigerator door handle or lids only halfway replaced on food cartons, an accident waiting to happen for the next person who happened to have the misfortune to follow me. “Oops! Sorry.”

Just now, Big Bore gently informed me that I forgot to screw on the cap to my peach water bottle. He bumped into it and the kitchen cabinet top took a soaking. "Oops! Sorry." seems to have become my mantra. I think it’s safe to say that the Clean Gene must have skipped right over me.

4 comments:

Dusti said...

Well, unlike you, I think I've become more accident prone as I've gotten older. Either that, or my big brother/younger sibblings aren't around to take the blame! I guess in time Gabe could... :-)

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Anonymous said...

My husband is like a hurricane--he leaves a wake, of anything that has touched his hands. Of course, it never erupts on him, it is always me that the Silk container falls out of the fridge on, that finds the ants in his day old pizza remains or slips on whatever he dripped along on the bathroom floor. The minute he leaves I pick it all up and then hate it until he returns to slob it all up again. When he is gone, I just look around and feel how lonely it is. For every slob in the world, God created a perpendicular neat nick to pick up after them so they can whisk on to another mess unheeded. Lukily though, when I make a mess, he doesn't even notice!

Nancy Evans said...

Well,Diva, Mom says that one advantage to having poor eyesight is she doesn't get bothered by the dust balls that she can't see.