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2001-06-28 | 9:11 a.m.

I just put out four bags of old clothes on the porch for the Am-Vets to collect. It's the first time I have made the Am-Vets collection date, and we've lived in this house for almost three years.

(I'm trying to do what Stephen has encouraged me to do, namely, to acknowledge actual accomplishments, no matter how small, and give myself a tiny hurrah instead of always focusing on my failures.)

Duff's parents arrive shortly. The house looks like a very cluttered house, on the extreme end of acceptable, but---after vigorous cleaning by multiple adults and children---now stopping short of a health department risk. Felony has a dress rehearsal tonight for her dance performance on Saturday. And guess what? Those horrible tan tights from the last show turned up yesterday. Praise Betty.

I have discovered yet another reason to prefer hardwood floors to carpet. You can sweep a hardwood floor after it has accumulated an embarrassing amount of small pieces of paper, beads, coins, paper clips, pen caps, foam popcorn, actual popcorn, bobby pins, rubber bands, candy wrappers, pencils, children's books, an old Eurythmics cassette, a small plastic bowling pin, Tinkertoys, Colorforms, kids' meal toy parts, feathers, socks, cardboard bricks, and the like. But a carpet, especially a vintage avocado-green shag carpet like this one, cannot easily be swept. Or raked. As best as I can determine, the only way to clear it is to pick up every particle larger than a pea by hand, assuming the classic sharecropper stoop. Then vacuum. This is redolent of the wash-dishes-then-put-in-dishwasher model, don't you think? I think it stinks.

My sister the professional housecleaner says she admires me for at least admitting that I am a slob. Our mother won't. But she doesn't make as big a mess as I do. I do try to clean, even read books about cleaning, but I am best at the micro-level. Ask me to clean the stove, or the refrigerator, or the hardwood floor, and I can do it. Once upon a time I detailed motorcycles, for which the dealership charged $150. But the big picture overwhelms me. I watch Cinderella with the kids and envy Cinderella because she can clean that big castle with a happy heart.

There is a lot of pressure to hold it together on days like these. There is always an invisible stopwatch ticking away in another room; a room I never bother to clean. Frank called last night and we talked about a couple of things I want to make sure he includes in his next book, a piece of writing I had sent him, and how hard it can be to live a dual life as writer and citizen (that sounds fatuous, but the convo wasn't). While we talked, Duff sat in the stopwatch room, counting the minutes. After I got off the phone, in the car, he said, "The first time you said you had to go was at seven o'clock. I checked." It was 7:49. He looked at me, waiting for the import to sink in. It did sink in, but it wasn't the import he had hoped for.

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