House Pride Cometh Before the Fall

Back in the Victorian ages, parents wanted their daughters to play with dolls and dollhouses in order to learn house pride. I had Barbies and a Barbie Townhouse with an elevator equipped with a pulley which I thought was the coolest invention ever. Instead of learning house pride, I imagined Ken as Shaun Cassidy and me as Barbie and we drove around in our plastic convertible listening to Larry Lujack on WLS AM Radio play "Da Doo Ron Ron."

Mopping the floors and dusting furniture was not in my daily schedule at the Barbie Townhouse. My only agenda was surfing by day and dancing in discotheques by night in our matching polyester pant suits I found in JCPenney catalog.

So late (or should I say later) in life I learned house pride.

I scrubbed the kitchen floor today and it felt like I did 100 pushups. That alone inspired me to consider housecleaning a workout. Last week I dusted furniture after staring at it for months, reveling in the smell of orange oil. I dusted all the places I could reach using a step ladder. But as I climbed the stairs I noticed dust on top of our ceiling fan. I was entranced at the thickness of the dust layer as I recalled one of my mom's questions as she cleaned the house when I was a budding pre-teen planning my pool party with Ken/Shaun Cassidy:

"Did someone die under your bed?" she asked.

Looking up from my Tiger Beat magazine with the pic of an open-shirted and floppy-haired Shaun, I said, "No, why?"

"When you die, don't you turn to dust?"

I looked under my bed and sure enough, dust bunnies multiplied faster than the future Octomom's spawn.

Had Mom not pointed it out the dust to me, I would have never known. Now as a mom myself, I look at my ceiling fan and decide if there is dust where I don't see it, it does not exist. Sort of like a tree making a sound while falling in the woods. It does but if no one's around, does anyone care if it makes a sound as long as it doesn't kill anything?

So the dust on the ceiling fan will stay right where it is. Until Mom visits and asks if someone died on my ceiling fan.