April 8, 2014

• Carpet

  In the shade of the epochal gnomon,
  The parlance of household chore common
  Includes sweeping and raking,
  And beating and shaking.
  The carpet was tough and so was the woman.

  I wrote this limerick late last night and it wasn't what I wanted. I've been trying all day to write what I want and it's not working out, so this is what you get for today's NPM Scavenger Hunt entry.

  I hate vacuum cleaners. When they came out with the bagless ones, advertising, "Never pay for another bag!" I though it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. What they didn't tell you is that you'll pay a lot more for the filters required by the bagless vacuum cleaner and the filters will get harder and harder to find until you give up and buy a new vacuum cleaner even though the old one still works but you can't use it without a filter and you've banged the living crap out of the old filter trying to pound the dust out of it by beating it on the driveway. How was that for a sentence? Not very poetic, I know.

  Thinking about all of that got me thinking about the generations of women before me and how they handled cleaning the carpets. There was my mom, who had a canister vacuum cleaner with unwieldy hoses that had to be dragged all over the house. She tripped over it once and broke her toe. When shag carpeting was all the rage, we had a carpet rake. It looked like the one on the left in the photo.

  

  After the carpet was vacuumed, it had to be raked so it wouldn't look tangled... or something. I'm not really entirely clear on why we raked the carpet, but we did. In a five bedroom house that was carpeted from top to bottom and in between (the staircase), vacuuming and raking the carpet was a huge chore.

  My grandmothers would have probably used a carpet sweeper.

  

  It wasn't as bulky as the canister vacuum cleaner, but it also didn't clean the carpet as well. But oh, what an improvement it must have been for the young housewife whose mother had to roll up the carpets, drag them outside, throw them over fences, clotheslines and bushes, and whack them with a carpet beater.

  

  My great-grandmother was a small woman; her mother was teeny-tiny. Women back then had to be so much tougher than we are today with our wimpy little upright, bagless vacuum cleaners.

  One of my grandmothers had wooden floors in her house. The living room and her bedroom might have had carpeting; it's been too long for me to remember. I do know there were lots of floors and a staircase that needed sweeping with a broom. I can imagine that she had neither the time nor the patience to bother with carpet and all the extra work that came with such a luxury. Besides, her broom was a multipurpose household tool. When she figured out my dad was sneaking out at night by climbing out his bedroom window and shinnying down the drainpipe, she decided to catch him in the act. Grabbing her broom, she stood outside in the shadow of the house and waited for him to appear on the roof. Until the day she died, she denied it was a shotgun in her hands. Until the day he died, Dad did not believe it was a broom. Regardless of what it was, he was scared straight and his nocturnal adventures were over, at least for a time.

  • 1:36 pm
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