New Friends

My apartment is way cleaner than yours. Remember last summer when our tenement building was infested with bed bugs? This summer, it's cockroaches. And apparently, cockroaches bother Poompy 100 times more than bed bugs. Apparently, he feels about cockroaches the way I feel about spiders. I HATE SPIDERS.

A couple of days ago, our neighbor (interestingly enough, the same neighbor who first told us about the building bed bugs) stopped me in the hallway:

"Have you had a problem with roaches?"
"Huh? Uh, nope."
"Did you see them in the hall on Tuesday?"
"What? No. Wait... now that you mention it, I did see one on the wall in the second-floor hallway."
"While I was eating breakfast on Tuesday morning a stream of cockroaches started pouring in under my front door. I opened my front door to see what was going on, and I swear to god, it was like a scene in a horror film. There must've been a thousand cockroaches swarming the walls, ceiling and floor of the hallway. I called the super and I guess he sprayed or whatever because they were gone that night. But you better spray your apartment."
"Wow. That's disgusting. Thanks."

Last night when I came home from work I was greeted by five fist-sized roaches scurrying along the baseboards of the third-floor hallway. My hallway. I opened my front door and the first thing I saw was a huge roach on the wall above my kitchen table. Poompy walked in right then to greet me, saw the look on my face, looked at the wall I was staring at, and then he almost started crying. And that was that. The cleaning began. And continued when he dragged my sorry ass out of bed at 8 a.m. to help him. I mean, he is serious about this cleaning. After I'd slurped down a cup of coffee this morning, the first thing he had me do was empty all the book shelves and vacuum each book individually, then scrub down each shelf, the walls behind the bookcases and the floor underneath them. That alone took me 2 1/2 hours. Then I had to empty all the shelves where I keep my girly primping things and scrub those shelves, then give each bottle of everything its very own bath. Poompy had me washing picture frames, chachkis and windowsills. Windowsills! When I left for work this afternoon, he was scrubbing the walls behind the refrigerator. Poompy is The Home Cleaning Nazi.

I have to admit though, our apartment was, well, it needed a good cleaning. It is remarkable to me the dust and dirt that I manage to completely ignore. I saw dust today that I've never seen before, except that I know it's been there for awhile because an inch of dust doesn't collect over night. So how come I never noticed it? Don't misunderstand, we aren't dirty people. We're messy, but we're not dirty. We vacuum every other day, we mop and clean out the bathtub and toilet at least every other week. That's pretty good, right? We do our dishes after every meal and we never let old food sit out. But we don't dust. Ever. Ever. Ever. I was astonished to pull a book off a shelf and discover an INCH of dust on the shelf rail behind it. My parents were in town recently and I watched my mother pick up a framed photo of Poompy and I. She looked at it and put it back and I thought to myself, "Awww. She's admiring a sweet photo of me and my beloved. Isn't that nice?" Today, I picked up that same frame to clean the windowsill underneath it and discovered that it was wearing it's own fur coat. A fur coat made of NYC grime and dog hair. And I realized what my mother had actually been thinking when she looked at the photo: "Dear God, my daughter never cleans her apartment. Get me out of here before I catch something." Only she's just too classy to say anything.

Well, don't worry, Mama. That picture frame is cleaner now than it was when I bought it. And the rest of the apartment? Even Aunt Sue would be proud.

But I'm curious. How often am I supposed to dust? How often do you dust? And really, honestly, how long does it take you? Because I only have so much time in a week to dedicate to apartment cleaning, and I just can't see myself doing the kind of cleaning we did today on a regular basis.

P.S. I say "we" but actually it was mostly Poompy. What kind of special treat says "Thank you for being the Home Cleaning Nazi"? Suggestions welcome.