Naturally, being in my mother-in-law’s pristine new house motivated me today to do some cleaning in my own. Josh and the kids went in after lunch to load some stuff that was still at the old house. I stayed behind with one of the boys. I didn’t want to be away from home that long. While we were here we started some laundry and dusted and wiped down the washer and dryer. I was going to do more in the downstairs storage area but it wasn’t as disheveled as it can sometimes be down there.

Next we went up to the bathroom. I deeper cleaned everything but the tub and shower. I took a knife and scraped the wax off the floor from a tipped over candle. It’s been there for months. Some things you see and are just not bothered by. It’s when someone else sees it that I tend to become bothered. One of my husband’s aunt’s had this dusting rag she was using to wipe down shelves and sticky spots off of mugs. She would probably be appalled to see our house. I don’t clean that much.

While I was doing that my son replaced the rusted vent cover with a new one I’d bought over the summer when I was doing the bedrooms. It’s just sat there on the floor all this time, another one of those things that just never bothered me. I bleached behind the toilet and cleaned the rest of the floor. While I was doing that I thought of a woman who’d helped us pack our bathroom when we moved from Hoyleton. I was a little mortified at the time wondering what might’ve all been in there.

I remember whenever we were moving into a new place my mother-in-law would always want to help me make up our bed. Every time. This way it’d be ready for us to sleep in. I really didn’t mind except that the mattress pad we had at the time had a dark brown, apple sized stain in the middle from some time when I had weirdly bled through the sheets. That was like a fluke occurrence and yet there was always this stain there whenever she and I stretched out the mattress pad and sheets.

She never said anything. The woman who helped pack up our bathroom I don’t think said anything either. This woman and her brother and sister were very nice people. It’s humbling when people are near your stuff, your space, especially the parts you don’t normally show people. But you wouldn’t have been as thankful for them if they hadn’t have gotten near it. When we were done with the bathroom we met everyone in town at the new house and brought the rest of the stuff in from the cars.