Dust Thou Art

To all neat-freaks: please skip this post.
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When I was little, we used to fight over the chore list. We argued over two things: dusting and cleaning floors. Who WOULD dust and who WOULDN'T mop the floors, to be precise. It's not that we all loved dusting, it's just that there was so little dust accumulation in one week that it didn't feel like a "chore" at all.

In fact, Mom didn't usually notice if we skipped that "chore" altogether.

Until we'd skipped it a few weeks running....

I remember the time we were expecting company and Mom wrote our names in the dust on the coffee table. "Katie and Paul dusted this," it read, quite legibly. Embarrassing, no?

We did the dusting for a while after that.

Recently, I'm sorry to admit, the dusting somehow slipped back off the chore list. And dust writing is back in style. Only, it's not been Mom this time. It's been the kids...

Smiley faces, ferocious piratical symbols, tic tac toe, finger and hand prints, and names. I'd like to add that John's name is nowhere to be seen. With typical foresight, he assumes that if he writes his name in dust, he'll be the one called to do clean it off.

A couple of weeks ago, I stepped out of the bathroom, glanced at the big slatted blind opposite me...and saw one smiley face too many.

I emptied all the socks in my drawer to tackle that nearly-black blind. Thirty minutes and two dozen socks later, the blind looked nearly-white again, what you could see of it through the settling cloud of gray...

I figure by the time I finish all six of the front blinds it will be time to start over.

Or maybe it will be time to acclaim one of my fine siblings Dust Artist of the Year...and wait until spring cleaning to erase their work. After all, who's to say that one house can accumulate enough dust in a month to make dusting be a "real" chore. I never did believe in wasting time on pseudo-chores.