I fully expect a community columnist to serve light fare, but I also expect her columns to focus on, I dunno, the community. Enter Winona (Minn.) Daily News columnist Katie Buck, house cleaner:
I think I have a genetic disorder. I know my family thinks so. Every January I get the urge to clean closets and drawers.
Here’s a tip: if your entire column is written without any research, and the most-used letter is “I,” then it’s not journalism, it’s an inner monologue on the lam.
So somewhere on that DNA spiral of chromosomes there lurks a housecleaning chromosome that causes this urge. Unfortunately, somewhere else on the chromosome display there are two other chromosomes that sabotage the whole plan. One is distractibility, and the other is allergies.
About the time I get a good head of steam up in January (on a rare day that’s not scheduled for an activity outside the home) and I have all the stuff in a closet strewn over most of a room, (usually the bed) the phone rings or the dog barks — or both — and I lose my place. Then there are e-mails, other calls, lunch, down time to rest and read a bit, pick up the snail mail and before you know it, it’s time to make supper.
About bedtime when I approach the bed full of stuff, I remember what I was doing when the phone rang or the dog barked, and I hastily stuff the stuff back where it came from. That’s how the distractibility chromosome comes into play.
There’s a word. It’s on the tip of my tongue. It has something to do with newspapers. It involves reviewing articles and improving them. What is it? Hmmm. Oh yes, yes. Edit. The word is edit. And one who edits is an editor. A novel concept really.
That other bugaboo chromosome, the allergies one, starts me sneezing and wheezing when the dust starts to fly.
“Starts me.”
No longer do we have the annual ritual to drag out rugs and beat the bejeebers out of them on the clothes lines, which hardly anyone has anymore, except my neighbor and me.
A moment of silence, please, for Strunk and White.
Allow me to summarize the rest: her experiences with cleaning products, an allergic reaction, a new stove and the phrases, “Curtains are a piece of cake now compared with my childhood” and “You have not lived until you’ve cleaned wallpaper…”
Sigh.
