In the Spring, an Old Man’s Fancy Turns Lightly to Thoughts of Dust Bunnies

Before my kids became functioning bipeds we heard a wonderful idea for getting the little freeloaders to earn their keep: Spray their onesies with dust-collecting product so that they serve as human mops while they crawl across on the floor.

We never actually tried it, and I have a feeling novelty clothing like the Babymop, which looks like a onesie tricked out with chaps, isn’t setting sales records for the simple reason that we prefer not to think about the shmutziness of our floors while our darling shnoopynoops are spending many of their waking hours in close contact with them.

I thought of the Babymop idea over the weekend when my household celebrated the arrival of spring in depressingly middle-aged fashion. Instead of dancing with the daffodils, we waltzed with the vacuum cleaner and shimmied with the sponge mop.

Our usual standard is to make the house company-clean, which mostly involves hauling piles of books, papers and clothing from the downstairs rooms to the upstairs rooms, where no guest is likely to go. This latest cleaning frenzy went deeper, and not only because we dealt with the piles in the upstairs rooms as well. This cleaning entailed use of the Manmop, which is to say the use of me, Man, as mop.

Specifically, I went dust bunny hunting under the conjugal bed. I did not coat myself with cleaning spray, though I might as well have. Armed only with a handheld duster that bears a striking resemblance to Albert Einstein’s hair, I flailed about under the bed with such zeal that both Einstein and I covered ourselves in glory, which is to say, trophy dust bunnies, also known, in cruder quarters, as ghost turds.

I also found a spray-tanned mogul lurking under there. “Out, Donald,” I said. “Go be the monster under somebody else’s bed.”

I do not wish to give the impression that I never clean under the furniture in my house. I routinely poke the vacuum cleaner into such places, but I had noticed that the machine does a fine job of sucking up clumps, while leaving behind a fine film of dust. My aim was to go after that film. Suffice it to say that I make a fine Manmop.

**

It was a perfect weekend for house cleaning. The calendar said spring but the weather said, oh it is, is it?

The cold spell was all my fault: As part of the cleaning jag, I rashly banished the Big Coat to the attic for the season. Cue the snow squalls.

After a half day of dusting, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, wiping and putting things where they actually go rather than on the nearest available table or chair, our house was about as tidy as it’s been since the day we moved in. Which, by my mother’s and grandmother’s (and for all I know, great grandmother’s and great-great grandmother’s) standards, probably was only passably clean.

That’s because these women were crazy clean. The highest praise they could give to a balabusta — Yiddish for good housekeeper — was that at so-and-so’s house, you could eat off the floors.

Not that they ever would. These were not people of the five-second rule. Their horror of the unclean bordered on – no, crossed over into – superstition.

(Food scientists have tested the five-second rule, by the way. Their careful conclusions: depends on the food, depends on the floor. Generally – surprise! – yucky stuff clings to wet food more than it clings to dry, which means you’re safer invoking the five-second rule when the fallen food is an Oreo than when it’s an orecchietta.)

In my family, crazy-clean wasn’t just a female thing. Among the few facts I know about Morris Berg, my maternal grandfather, are that he had red hair (like my mom and one of my daughters) and a hot temper, sold ladies’ hats – and was compulsively clean.

My mom remembered her father walking the streets of Brooklyn with a chamois – no, not a mountain goat, but a soft polishing cloth – and stopping every so often to wipe the shmutz off his shoes.

My dad remembered that when he bought his first car, a Model A Ford, ol’ Morris would go out there with his chamois and give the car the same treatment he gave his shoes. He also remembered that when he stayed with the Bergs while on leave during World War II, he’d wake up and find that his father-in-law had pressed his uniform while he slept.

I do not take after Morris, except, possibly, for sharing a keen appreciation of ladies’ hats. I would therefore advise against eating off the floors in my house, though I do so routinely.

Provided, of course, that neither Oreo nor orecchietta lingers among the dust bunnies and ghost turds any longer than five seconds.