clean streak

I don't know what came over me yesterday, but I went on a crazy cleaning spree that lasted for hours. I did laundry, cleaned out and wiped down the fridge, vacuumed, mopped, reorganized closets and generally restored the first two rooms of the trailer to a shining orderliness.

And it felt good. Probably part of it stems from the fewer hours I'm working at my second job, since it's the slow season there, and I've grown accustomed to fifteen hours of constant motion. Yesterday when I arrived home, I made dinner (yummy leftovers of this Mexican-style dish I threw together from my steady old starter of a diced onion, cubed beef/chicken, a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of French onion soup -- with those four ingredients as a baseline, anything is possible) and then found myself sitting on the couch staring at my cell phone and thinking, "It's only 6:30? I'm bored."

So I popped in a couple of feel-good movies (Hairspray and The Mask of Zorro) and went about in a whirlwind of delighted domesticity.

The reward? A sparkling living space, an absurdly happy cat, satisfaction with my mental health (since I can't remember the last time I actually wanted to clean, and took joy from the cleaning -- I think it was sometime back in '05), good smells in the home, and the rediscovery of my long-lost cheesecloth which I've been wanting in order to strain my homemade yogurt to thicken it properly, India-style. (Yes, I've once again begun making my own yogurt. I also have a recipe in my newest Indian cookbook for a simple homemade cheese that I'm itching to try. If I had my way in life, I would do very few things but write and stay in the house all day making weird food from scratch. My dream house is mostly a kitchen with slate floors and a state-of-the-art stereo system and many different kinds of ovens and a vast fireplace and lots and lots of windows and high ceilings and bare rafters from which to hang dried herbs and peppers and garlic and pots and pans and meat and hanging plants, and a huge basement/cellar with separate rooms for the aging cheese and the home-canned goods and the preserved lemons and the homemade sauerkraut, and a garden just outside on one side of the back lawn and an enormous bricked and walled patio on the other with the kinds of ovens and grills a person can't keep indoors -- a clay oven, a tandoor, a large brick oven, an industrial-style grill. And then of course there's all the traveling I'd have to do both as fuel for writing and to eat new foods to come back and learn how to make. Cue If I Had a Million Dollars.)

After an evening of busy be-bopping around the house, I couldn't get tired, and finally closed my eyes on midnight smiling.

Tonight I can't wait to tackle the national disaster commonly known as my car, and then roll up my sleeves to go after the bathroom and bedroom.