Soft Soap

Every once in a while, I look around our house and realize that chaos is more than a theory. I'm not a neat freak, but when I can't find a flat surface to eat on I get edgy. Our dining room table would make a good subject for archeology students as long as they've had all their shots. They could sift the layers for weeks and learn a lot about the eating, reading and playing habits of the modern family.

At the moment, there's a pile of junk mail that goes back to ads for Memorial Day. Daughter's old Gameboy Advance lies discarded with its battery compartment agape, because the AA's were needed for the new Gameboy DS system that's permanently attached to her hands. Next to it, there's a pile of Neopet magazines, a credit card offer for the house's former owner (we've lived here for six years), a stuffed elephant named Henry with a homemade stretch bracelet around his trunk (the letter beads spell out "ILPB" which stands for "I love peanut butter"), four potholders, a paintbrush that's as stiff as a board, an empty egg carton, a coupon that expired in February for a brand of toothpaste that we don't use, and one of the dog's yellow tennis balls.

Every other table in the house, every counter, every bureau, every tv top, hamper cover and flat-topped appliance, including the dormant pellet stove, is encumbered with enough flotsam and jetsam to fuel a landfill. It looks like a chain store exploded or someone's yard sale flew in through the windows. This has GOT to stop!

I suppose I could get someone in to do housework a couple hours a week, although that didn't work out too well before when we had a local woman come in on Friday mornings. Her name was Genie and she came highly recommended by a former friend. For the ridiculously small sum of twenty dollars, she offered to do four hours of whatever I needed done in the way of cleaning and organizing. Except windows. Genie didn't do windows unless you paid her ten dollars an hour and I wasn't about to do that. So I told her I'd make a list and she could do as much of it as possible in four hours.

She arrived with buckets, cleaning supplies, a mop, a broom and her own vacuum. When I saw what she used to clean with, I assured her that we wouldn't be needing her supplies, because we preferred the natural cleaning solutions that we've always used. This did NOT sit well with Genie.

"I can't guarantee your house'll be clean if I don't use my stuff," she huffed. "That natural stuff is junk. It don't clean like my chemicals do."

"Well, natural cleaning supplies work for me, Genie," I said, "And that's what I'd like you to use. Can you live with that?"

She huffed again. She was a huffer.

"I guess," she said.

I showed her what we had under the sink: white vinegar, baking soda, liquid glycerine soap concentrate, Kool-Aid.

"What the heck is the Kool-Aid for?" she said.

"Toilets," I answered. "It has citric acid in it, so we put it in the bowls and let it sit overnight and then brush them in the morning and they're nice and clean."

"I guess it's okay if you got a kid that drinks out of the toilet bowl. My grandson used to do that. I think it's pretty wacky, but if that's what you want. You're the boss."

That became Genie's mantra. When she asked where the Jet Dry rinse aid was and I told her we used white vinegar, I was the boss. When I made her stop pouring bleach down the drain from a secret stash she had in her huge pocketbook, I was the boss, even though she could tell me horror tales about what bubbles up onto your lawn if you don't kill the germs in your "septic cistern" as she called it. "Something green comes creeping up out of your drain and poisons a kid, don't blame me," she told me, as she poured vinegar onto baking soda to bubble the drains clean.

Genie was a hard worker, but she was a talker. Even when there was no one in the room, we could hear her nattering on about this and that. Very often it was of a religious nature, which didn't bother us, although we're not. Of a religious nature, that is. Apparently, she wasn't aware of this, because she took our glycerine soap bottle to heart. We use Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, whose bottles are covered with extremely esoteric religious slogans. I've read most of them and I get the impression that the late Dr. Bronner was a good man, if somewhat grammatically challenged, but his philosophy is a bit murky.

The label is full of references to Rabbi Hillel, Marx, Jesus and even Einstein. When I read it, I feel like I could almost make sense of it, if I only had a little more knowledge of the Shema, the Torah, Rudyard Kipling, The Communist Manifesto and the Rosetta Stone. I think that a rudimentary understanding of soapmaking basics wouldn't hurt either and it would probably help if I had a few electric shock treatments like Dr. Bronner had back in the 40's when he was arrested and committed to a mental hospital. Luckily for all the castile soap fans out there, he escaped and moved to California lock, stock and soap mixing barrel. That might have something to do with why his soap is now made with hemp instead of jojoba, although that's just a wild guess on my part.

Anyhow, Genie loved to read the Dr. Bronner bottle and often quoted whole paragraphs of it as she swept and straightened and made our house much easier to live in. Although she still thought we were lunatics, she put up with our strange ways and we'd still probably have her cleaning every Friday, if she hadn't decided to give her pastor, a very fundamentalist kind of guy, a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Soap for Christmas.

Maybe Pastor Bob has better eyesight than Genie and read the wackier ravings of Dr. B, which is in very small print. Maybe he has higher standards than Genie or has heard that we're atheists. Actually, when my kids went to school, some of the little lambs in Pastor Bob's flock used to chase them at recess and call them satanists and tell them they were going to hell, so who knows what Pastor Bob thinks of us. Not much, I'd say. He told Genie that we belonged to a cult (that brainwashed people with castile soap?) and she was risking her immortal soul by working for us.

When Genie called to tell me that she wouldn't be available anymore, I thought of finding someone else to take her place. Somehow though I didn't. Time went on. Things piled up on the tables and chairs and counters. The daily hunt for keys, glasses, clean underwear and library books started up again and life got back to normal. When we ran out of liquid soap the other day, I toyed with the idea of getting a different brand, but then I read the ingredients on the new stuff and it was jojoba all the way without a trace of hemp. I really think the hemp adds something to Dr. B's, so that's what I'm going to get. I may put it into another container though, just in case I decide to get some help with the housework.




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