Translated…
Someone’s coming over, and so, on May 1st, Labor Day, we’d had a spring cleaning, cleaned up the left-alone for god-knows-how-long environment. After I’d peeled back the layers of dust bunnies off the legs of our couch, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Where did all this dust come from?”
To tell the truth, I’d been troubled by this question for a very long time now. To me, this question is just as difficult as “Where do humans come from?” I couldn’t understand, it wasn’t as if I’d opened up the windows all that much at all, and, we don’t live next door to a construction site either, so, how come there are so much dust, attached to the books, the furniture, the bookcases, along with all the blank corners in our house?
I’d started discussing the question with my friend who came to visit me, she’d said, “Oh yes………I’d thought about that too. I’d even done an experiment, tried to not open the windows, but later on, I’d discovered, that the bedroom would still get dusty just the same. Maybe, it’s because as I’d come into the house, I’d brought the dusts in?” “But, as we leave the house for a long time, as we’d returned, there would still be a lot of dust.” “Perhaps, dusts are a living organism that they’d run here?”, my friend told me, as a joke.
Dusts are alive, this sounded like the works of Junji Ito, or Bruno Schulz. But, on some levels, it’s very real. Like how those dust mites would come, uninvited, and, become the number one enemies of housewives.
“Why is there so much dust in Krav?”, I’d once asked my mother. “I don’t recall having so much dust in Taipei.” “There was still plenty.” My mother said, bashfully, “It’s just the color of our furniture, that’s made them less noticeable.” (after she’d told me, I’d recalled, that maybe it was because I never had to clean before, that, was why I’d failed to notice.”
The hardest part to clean in the house, was the carpet in my son’s room. Because the carpet wasn’t very tight, and, every time I’d vacuumed, the carpet would get pulled up, and I didn’t want to use too much force in the area. Even if I’d vacuumed everything, as I’d gone across with the rolling tape from IKEA (seems I’m not the only one who’s at her wits ends about dusts, otherwise, why would someone invent such an item?), I could still manage to find a ton of hair on the adhesives.
But, no matter how hard it is to clean, I’d still needed to clean things off. I’d felt defeated, as I’d gone to get the vacuum cleaner out of the closets, because I wanted to encourage myself, I’d told my son, “Look at this vacuum, doesn’t it look like some sort of an animal?”
“Yeah, looks like a dinosaur!” “What kind?” “The vegetarian!” “Oh yes, brontosaurus! It has a very long neck, and, very, very, very large belly………” “and long tail too!”, my son pointed to the wires excitedly. “Yes!”, I’d smiled and told him, “Remember how dinosaurs needs a lot of food? Let’s make it eat dust now!”
And so, we’d carried our prehistory animal, and, clean up the dust that may have come into existence, in the prehistoric eras of time.
And so, this, is how you can change an annoying routine of cleaning, vacuuming, into something fun, with the imagination of a child.
Life, the Obstacle Course 