On Dustpans

 

Girls and ladies: what did your mother teach you? Are you confident in your mastery of the domestic arts? Fortunately there are a few brave mentors who still maintain a classroom by example and some professional advice-givers who have World Wide Web sites offering scads of information, hints and suggestions. We do the examining and the analysis and the sifting so you don’t have to. More often than not, daughters, nieces and sisters are left to fend for themselves and to learn what they can from disparate sources and they are not instructed from the altar of the home front, where lessons are best absorbed in a hopefully loving hands-on demonstration. A young girl of my acquaintance positively delights in helping make a guest bed, mainly because she enjoys the graceful scent of liberally sprinkled Roberts Borotalco from Florence, Italy. Many mothers don’t have time or even the inclination to pass along to their daughters (and sons) the precepts for managing and maintaining a household in all its many details. It is a management position as you well know!

            This is why we have tutorials and encouragements for so many otherwise ordinary household tasks, such as sweeping. The therapeutic value of sweeping is not to be ignored. It has a sort of quiet and restful cadence to it, plus you have the immediate gratification of observing the accumulation of your effort into tidy piles. Things do get tricky beyond your choice of broom. There are many forms of dustpan and some are designed to be stylish rather than functional. A nesting hand broom may be functional for compact storage but what do you do with it if you choose to work with a long-handled natural bristle broom? Don’t be gulled into believing that all dustpans function equally. Some of them are just cheap and poorly made.

            Before you buy a dustpan for your home, consider the uses to which it will be put. Wood, linoleum and tile floors all offer completely different surface challenges for pick-up. The crevices of grout or channels of wood are vexing impediments for most dustpans and you will want to think about how you will manage to scoop up the last granules. A portable vacuum is one solution but its attendant noise destroys any reverie. Take your reveries when you can, I say. A whisk broom may be the answer.

            A coarse surface like a concrete garage floor requires a different broom and a different dustpan and illustrates the fact that you may want to have various dustpan and broom combos strategically placed around the home. For those who think that a vacuum is the all-purpose solution I would recommend that you examine the edge of area rugs after you have vacuumed. I’ll bet that you find a thin line of dirt along that perimeter if you haven’t lifted the rug. The place at which surface textures change is always a reservoir for dust and dirt to accumulate, and my dear Wallace has often pointed out to me the physics of it: a change in momentum accompanies a change in the coefficient of friction! Words to live by!

                                Tra la la,                       Celeste

Another Day

 

Another day! Or as my Wallace says, “Another chance to get it right!” Some of us don’t get up in the morning and that is not from sheer lassitude. It may be because the night shift does not allow it. For those who do get up, whether with the rising sun or not, the traditional English greeting of “Good Morning”, abbreviated to “Morning” or its lazier version “Mornin’” is heard in that early time all across the world. As a matter of interest, you may be intrigued by how other languages speak this simple greeting. In Lithuania: “Labas Rytas”; in Italy: “Buongiorno”; in Holland: “Goedmorgen”; in Hawai: “Aloha Kakahiaka”; in Sweden: “God Morgon”; in Uzbekistan: “Xayrlitong”; in Scotland: “Maidam Mhath” and in Wales: “Bora Da”. I leave the pronunciation to the expert speakers. This short list illustrates a couple of things. First, the Welsh are not revenging themselves on the English in all their phrases and second, it is universally accepted as a greeting of good will, a beginning. The word “Hello” is also universal but it carries a neutral connotation. It does not express the hint of bonhomie conveyed by “Good Morning”. A song in the movie “Singing in the Rain” may be an apotheosis of that sentiment.

I think about things like that. In solar sequence around the world these murmurs occur each day in every language in a common ritual. Almost all of us are stimulated to this address whether encouraged by temple bells, a partner stirring, bird song, the blasted alarm clock or the even more hated leaf blower. Sirens have lately become a more common provocation. I like to think of them as help on the way rather than as a shout that something terrible has happened. In any case a greeting is forthcoming.

Where sunny days are the rule, the charm of sunrise may not be so welcoming. When it is 115° F by nine o’clock in the morning day after day, the experience of a sunrise may be completely different than that in a garden above the sea from a redwood deck beneath a wisteria pergola in California. It is pretty easy to embrace a yogic attitude to that. Sometimes a cloudy day is a relief where the sun shines so unrelentingly. Can excessive vitamin D be a threat? UV rays are a different story.

Try to describe a sunrise. There are so many. Some are definitely memorable and they often include another person, on a mountaintop, in a tent, down on the dock, from the bedroom, from a plane or shipboard. Something about the new day promotes a momentary and genial lapse into cordiality. The colors in the clouds may be fiery or fierce, a mist may obscure definition or the foreground outline may be dramatic. When all is said and done, sunrise is a feeling. What it says is I am here. The breathing life we are living is worthy of shared acknowledgement. It’s a privilege to exchange greetings on the occasion. Sign language or gesture suffices. To say “Good Morning” is a celebration of something so ordinary that we can forget how meaningful and symbolic it is. It contains all we are. Together we can try to get it right.