Clean Sweep

Yesterday I was uneasy with the concept of vacation. Today the real glamour of time-off together revealed itself as, drum roll here, we shampooed rugs. Well, let’s say we planned on shampooing rugs before partaking in a vacation activity, but were out of carpet cleaner until my husband drove to every hardware store on the South Shore trying to find some. No fool, having beaten said rugs with a broom, vacuumed and then swept their leavings from the floor underneath; I took advantage of this respite by running to the computer to start a blog post. OK, you say, eyes rolling; she’s reached the dregs as far as blog topics go. But stick with me here because this has bigger connotations than floor coverings.

My husband and I will be married 25 years in September. If you count our dating life, we have already been together as a couple longer then we were single. Next year, at 26 years, we’ll tie the game. When we try to quantify all that time together, the details blur and in some ways, it seems like we have always been a unit. Most of the time we are together in things, but sometimes crabbiness or disagreement or impatience naturally sets in. One thing I know about Tim and me though, is that we always do well together on projects, even the forgettable ones.

In the course of 25 years, we have stripped, prepped, painted and or wallpapered--hmmm, let me count--yikes, 18 rooms in two houses. (We are on round two in our current abode.) On top of that, we planted gardens and trees at our old home and no kidding, we’ve transformed our current yard from a briar filled, weed covered, poison ivy infested plot that we inherited, to a casual, county ledge garden. Not including our daughter who is our greatest triumph but a topic unto herself, all around us we see the proof of what we’ve accomplished together. In all, I recall only one moment when we had to walk away from each other, and that was as a result of a nasty merging piece of wall paper, above a door, around a bulkhead on a non-straight wall after an entire day of hanging about twenty years ago. Even that finally got pasted.

As Tim patiently backed out of the driveway on his mission this morning, it occurred to me that sometime, you are so busy living the details; it’s hard to remember the big picture. Perhaps on a given day, that darn toothpaste tube that’s squished the wrong way drives you over the edge. When it does, it’s a good idea to step back from the sink, look at the paint on the bathroom walls and remember what you have pulled off together.

And since no good deed goes unrewarded, after we finished the carpets, here’s where we ate lunch.


"The Spit," North River, Scituate, MA