Walking the hair-thin line between Zen serenity and madness...

When you're walking around the house looking for things to dust...

It doesn't usually look like this. 

I've been making the house closer and closer to absolute perfection for three days, anticipating the forespoken arrival of the agency lady to take pictures, though no sign of this worthy has yet been heralded. She was supposed to be here on Thursday. I thought I had it ready then, but discovered that Mandelbrot had snuck in that night and installed an infinitely regressing metaphysical ladder of possible domestic perfection I will never reach the end of.

First daffodils of the season, and a sprig of a local wild brassica, blossoming mightily all over.

But the house...

I've washed everything that could be washed, dusted the tops of things that are never dusted or, verily, even seen by mortal eye. I've polished the windows, taken down and washed the curtains, removed an entire civilisation of dust bunnies under the bed.




I've been madly cleaning after doing anything. After the washing up for lunch I took a clean dry cloth and polished off all the water droplets on the sinkal area - they leave marks but if you get them fast enough...

But I'm in a state of domestic suspension. I can't *do* anything but clean or read a book - very carefully - until this wretched woman turns up. I am happy that my home is, perhaps for the first time in decades, in a condition I would not be embarrassed to invite my grandma into, but at some point the cleaning has to be finished and life resumed.

I can feel the tendrils of OCD mania coiling gently and insidiously into my mind... I'm wandering the house, dust cloth in hand, looking for things an inch out of alignment. I feel like I want to follow the kitties around with a lint brush. I am reminded that there are people who live like this all the time, and I am saddened for those poor suffering souls.

I will never be zen. Just too many of my Irish and Welsh female ancestresses clamouring in my mind.

This is how madness starts.



~