Clean-ing...is what I got

It’s been a weird and unexpected past few days. My daughter and I are in Texas, but we still haven’t arrived to my sister’s house.

Why?

Well, right before we were set to leave, we learned that my sister and her husband both had covid. Oh no.

So, we’ve scrambled, relying on the generosity of local friends. In Houston, we stayed with a couple who just moved there for two nights. It was a lot of fun, and I thoroughly enjoyed our shopping trips in service of stocking their new, nice apartment. I love to shop, and am endlessly fascinated by the endless variety at US stores, which I always seem to forget about when I’m in Mexico.

I know a lot of the stuff is just totally wasteful, but wow — how has anyone even thought of all these things? It makes me feel like an explorer on a discovery mission.

Me every time we go to HEB or Walgreens.

Plus their apartment complex has not one, but three pools. My kid didn’t even care that the water was ice cold (I did).

We then coordinated with another friend who picked us up half-way to Victoria at Buccee’s, now a Texas institution. This is another amazing shopping experience, though we didn’t stay long because the second friend wanted to make it to the No Kings march.

Now we’re with her. I’ve seen my sister with masks and distance (she tested negative yesterday after a round of medication — hooray! — one down, one to go). I even got nasal spray to repel viruses and the kind of Lysol spray to clear the air. We’ve brought back all the pandemic greatest hits!

We’ll stay one more night with our friend as a precaution, but hopefully my brother-in-law will test negative today too and we can finally “go home” to where we were meant to arrive in the first place.

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What do I have to offer in return for all this generosity? Perhaps some clever quips or words of wisdom, but those are not predictable.

What can I absolutely offer at any time? Cleanliness.

It feels a little lame, but cleaning — well, making spaces clean and organized and if I have anything to say about it, beautiful — is truly my “love language”: the way I show love and appreciation to others. When someone else does the same for me, my heart swells: they really, truly love me! (Do our childhood insecurities ever go away?)

So if you have a planned visit to my house, everything will be beautiful and in its place. If it’s not, then I really, truly, do not like you (and if I don’t, you won’t be invited to my house anyway).

And if I go to your house and I can possibly make it more clean and organized and beautiful, I will probably try; I literally cannot help myself.

But I’m trying to help myself, because I know that not everyone sees it as a gift, but rather an insult: You don’t think I can take care of my own house?

For Child Sarah, that was exactly the case: my parents could not take care of their own house, so me doing it was a gift — a big, extravagant one. It’s taken me a while to realize that not everyone sees it that way.

So, I will refrain as much as I can and try not to overstep. I will throw away my trash, and I will set my dishes carefully in the sink, and I will fold up any blankets that I use and make the bed. I might dust my area a little in a way that’s not an obvious makeover.

And when I finally make it to my sister’s, I will admire every inch of recently mopped floor, wiped down doorknob, and cracked open window to let the stale air out and the fresh air in.

And my heart will swell.