Theresa Lewis

Whenever I devise a plan of action, I have learned to make a backup plan just in case the first one blows up in my face, but I didn’t always do that.

I was newly married and keeping an impeccably clean house was of paramount importance to me. I was sure the world would stop if I did not wash the floors every day. We didn’t have much money back then and I was always mindful of ways to save a penny here and there. Since I washed the floors every day, they never had a chance to get dirty. To be frugal, I saved the floor washing water and used it for three or four days so I didn’t waste the soap.

It was summer and we were invited to spend a long weekend with friends in the country. I didn’t want to leave a bucket of water standing for that long so I emptied it and washed out my string mop and let it rest in the bucket until I returned to resume my floor washing task.

When we returned from our mini vacation, I knew the floors were still clean because there had been no one there to dirty them. I busied myself doing other chores and did not touch the bucket and mop that were sitting in the garage. The next day, I brought my bucket in to wash the floors. I filled it with hot water and soap and dunked the mop in the water and wrung it out with my bare hands. It felt a bit slimy, but nonetheless, I did it over and over again. I kind of noticed that there were funny little white things coming off the mop and wondered what it was. I thought that maybe the strings were getting old and were starting to break down. But why, I thought, did the pieces all look uniform? Suddenly, I saw something moving and realized that the mop that I had wrung out with my bare hands was loaded with maggots. I screamed and lost what little mind I had left. I wanted to cut off my hands. To this day, I have never owned another string mop. Until Swiffers were invented, I got down on my hands and knees and washed the floors. Swiffers are right up there with shower doors in a bathroom… they’re so civilized.

Speaking of maggots, I learned to never wash a feather pillow in the automatic washer. When the pillow gets thoroughly wet, the weight is astronomical. It jams the agitator of the automatic washer and the washer will not run. I had to struggle for hours to get the sodden pillow out of the machine. I rigged up a makeshift crane and pulley system to extricate the pillow from the machine. I estimated the weight to have been close to seventy five pounds. When I got the pillow out, it was dripping water all over the floor so I put the pillow into a huge bucket that my husband had in the garage. In time, I forgot about the pillow. It too went the way of the string mop.