Two days ago I moved a large glass soup carafe from the top shelf of the fridge. It broke as it dropped, spilling soup and glass all over the fridge and then all over the floor. Carrot and yam soup. Because Ezi acted faster than me, he used his method of cleaning which was to soak it up in a rag. I would have used the dustpan and a pail but I couldn’t stop him. Anyway, after about an hour of cleaning the glassy soup from the fridge and the floor, it was time to wash. But the floor remained sticky so today I went at it my way. That was when I remembered there are a number of ways and they all signify numerous things – gender, age, class, grace…
That was when I remembered my favorite movie, Satin Rouge (2002) in which Hiyyam Abass plays a widow whose house-cleaning moves lead her into picking up belly dancing and of course becoming a star. The motion of bending over with a rag and swinging it back and forth on the stone floors becomes the same movement on the dance floor only over her head.
Now when I first saw this movie I was still belly-dancing, and a more awkward and uncomfortable dancer you’ve never seen. So when I started washing the floor this way I remembered how I danced, moving with slightly bent knees, waving from the waist. And you know what, it wasn’t great. Much better when Ezi does it.
But the real point of this was that when I first learned to wash floors it was on my knees. Until we moved into a home that was completely carpeted in 1958, we washed and polished floors the old way. And then I moved to Israel in 1972, my Bulgarian mother-in-law and my Iraqi neighbor warned me that this was not for elegant ladies like me. In emergencies, I could use a rag on a stick – like a mop. But it was important to have a cleaner at least twice a week, and never be seen scrubbing floors.
The important thing about all this is that Yeats warned us that washing floors is easier than writing poetry. Here’s what he wrote:
‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’
