I’m Not Above It
Oh…my goodness. Where to start.
I posted an ad on Craig’s List to pick up some extra cash. I am not above scrubbing toilets.
Josh and I got to Kate’s house a few minutes early. [Name has been changed for confidentiality purposes.] We peeked through the windows.
Kate had already told me on the phone, that she was a heart patient.
What she failed to disclose, is that she is also a semi-hoarder.
And…her house hasn’t had a good cleaning in years.
We knocked on the door a few minutes early- no answer.
I caught the look in Josh’s eye and it was obvious that he was thinking the same thing.
We made our way quickly back to the car.
“Look. Let’s just call her. Tell her that it’s going to take longer than we thought. We can come back again,” Josh said.
“If we leave now, we’ll never be back,” I said. “It’s just how things go.”
So we started rationalizing.
“What if it was our Aunt Ida or something? Or a family member…”
“Why did we come here? To leave?”
“What is so important that we have to do besides help this woman?”
And so on.
And so between us both, we decided that we had no choice but to return to Nan’s house, and do the best we could for her.
I knew she was a fiercely intelligent woman; I could tell within seconds of meeting her. Her eyes beemed with an intense light. Her skin was amazing!
Nan was probably going on 60 or so, and I liked her right away. A very earthy, down-to-earth woman. My kind of person. No BS, no fronts. Just herself.
“Kate, you look like a psychologist,” I said to her.
“I am,” said Kate.
And so we stayed for five and a half hours and cleaned our butts off. We put in a few extra laps for her, and it was our pleasure.
I’m used to making $20 per hour by myself when I clean, given my 25+ years experience and proficiency in the area, but Josh and I are both doing the school thing, and we’d rather clean houses privately, and on our own time, than to work a public job and so on. Also, we get to meet many interesting people this way.
Kate cut us a check for $125. We kissed her dog Daisy goodbye, and locked up behind us.
I can barely believe we did what we did there in only five and a half hours. Unbelievable.
Grocery shopping. (Beer, watermelon, rasberries, vanilla ice cream, sodas, smoked mussels, etc.)
Dishes. Bubblebath. Cleaning my own house. A bit of reading in my schoolbook, “Alcoholism and Other Drug Problems”. And finally…
…to bed.
m o n o c h r o m e j u n k i e † 