Sin of the Month • Abby Bardi
	Cleaning

I’ve been cleaning my house.

I mean really cleaning. Getting on my hands and knees and scrubbing things, scraping things, brushing things with toothbrushes. This is because I have become addicted to the website www.flylady.net, which, for those of you who are not yet "FlyBabies," is a website devoted to decluttering your house and your life, and is designed for those of us who came to laugh but stayed to pray.

"Wow!" said my friend Rachel when she entered my kitchen the other day. Rachel has visited the past four kitchens I occupied, and this was the first one she had ever seen that did not still have crumbs on the counter from the piece of toast someone had last September. "What’s going on here?" she inquired, her mouth ajar.

"FlyLady," I told her. She immediately marched to my computer and signed up, and by noon, she had received thirteen emails from FlyLady containing various missions which I am prohibited by their copyright from sharing with you.

"This is great," she said, finishing her cup of tea and actually putting it in the dishwasher. "Your sink is glowing. I’m afraid to touch it."

"I’ve been cleaning since Hortense left last month," I told her. "It’s my way of coping. It makes me feel like I have everything under control."

You’ve probably been wondering what my daughter Hortense has been up to. For the past two and a half years, she has been sequestered at a small, arty college in upstate New York, which has basically kept her out of trouble. For the first semester she was gone, I sat in her room sobbing, surrounded by enormous posters of the band Radiohead. Then one day, I cheered up and began to consider the possibility that her room would make a great, if small, home recording studio.

However, so far, I haven’t had a chance to do much to Hortense’s room because it has seemed that despite being away at college, she was still very much inhabiting it. During her many holidays and the long, leisurely winter and summer breaks, Hortense has turned up here in cars full of grungy fellow-students, spread her clothes and artwork all over the room, and then departed again, leaving a swathe of destruction in her wake.

When she left again this past fall, I decided to take the first step in using Hortense’s room for something other than as a shrine to Hortense: I put a dog-grooming table in there. Henry, my dog, has very long fur, and it turns out that unless I want to give him a Marine-style crew-cut, he must be brushed just about every day or his luxuriant locks become clumps of ick.

Hortense’s reaction when she saw the table was, "Hortense out. Henry in." I tried to assure her that this was not the case, but then she enumerated a long list of people she knew whose mothers had replaced them with dogs when they left for college. "But no one could re–" I began, but she said, "Henry is the new Me," in the firm voice she uses when there is no point in arguing with her.

Although we feel guilty about it, Henry and I have enjoyed using Hortense’s room, which has a TV so Henry can watch E! True Hollywood Story, to which he is partial.

When Hortense came home for winter break, my husband insisted that I take the grooming table out of there, stating that it was rude to poor Hortense to expect her to sleep next to a canine apparatus (though I doubt that he would think it equally rude to turn the room into a home recording studio, since he’d like to have one. Dog grooming, on the other hand, is a matter of serene indifference to him). For five weeks, I had nowhere to brush Henry, so his fur turned into clumps of ick and had to be combed out by professionals, who castigated Henry and me for not being assiduous enough in our grooming habits. (The world of Dog Beauty is quite exacting.)

This semester, just as I had come to terms with her being as far away as New York, Hortense decided to go to Paris. Her return ticket isn’t until July, which gives me seven months in which to steal her room from her and turn it into whatever I want. Instead, I have turned it into a shrine to her: I hung her artwork all over the walls, and I allowed the swathe of destruction she had left behind her to remain until I couldn’t stand it any more, which was yesterday. Rachel watched as I rummaged through the strange piles of Hortense’s cast-off things left in torn bags near the door and tried to persuade her to take them all. I managed to foist a Sealy Posturepedic T-shirt on her (Hortense is a devoted thrift-shopper) but she forgot it, probably on purpose, when we left.

We went to a dog show in Baltimore where Henry competed and mostly lost, though he got a blue ribbon for coming in first out of one. He didn’t seem to mind, and may I say that his fur looked fabulous.

Every day, FlyLady sends a helpful, inspiring email inquiring as to the whereabouts of my laundry. I’m never sure where my laundry is, but I know where Hortense is: living next to the Louvre, being followed all over town by strange European men. I miss her, and I worry about her being so far away, though she calls all the time on her cell phone. Last week, she phoned from Montparnasse and said she was lost, so I found a map of Paris online and routed her to Shakespeare & Company, a famous bookstore, so she could buy something to read in English. She called later to tell me that she had bought Bleak House because it had the most pages for the money.

Her phone calls help keep me from being anxious, and the fact that she has a cell phone means I can reach her at odd times and make sure she’s all right, though often I just reach a recording of a woman speaking French too quickly for me to understand. Phoning Hortense makes me feel like I have everything under control, though she’s being followed by strange European men, and is across an ocean, and in any case, is 20 now and just about grown up.

So my dog has shining, well-brushed fur, and if you lean over my sink, you can just about see your face in it. But the truth is that I can’t control anything, really. I know that, but still, I am cleaning.