The Clean Rules
I readily admit, I have clean issues. Going to the store with me, living with me, is a chore. J is a saint for what he puts up with. No one else understands, cares to understand or will even take the time to attempt to do so. To my family, I’m a joke, a sad case that needs to be forced into acting as they prefer. I’ve written a little about the rules, if you’re interested.
Right now, I have a dishwasher sitting (two years!) on my back porch, still in its original box. There is simply too much involved in what it would take to bring it in and place it where the old one sits. Maybe someday. I’d rather hand wash the dishes than deal with it. Every dishwasher I’ve had has been unreliable anyway.
The porch is where our shoes are and under the old dishwasher are layers of filth and bare floor where rodents have once been. Its nasty back there. I don’t want to drag all that stuff out, the scum from the floor around the shoes in and have the filthy tools from the garage all over my clean kitchen.
First, let me explain that I come about this honestly. I have traveled to countries where sanitation and hygiene were poor to minimal. I took a job for a decade at a facility where I worked with children, already nasty little creatures, but these were the worst of the worst–kids with behavioral and psychiatric issues, ones who played in feces, in used feminine hygiene products. Ones who routinely had diseases and never washed their hands unless forced. And they were in charge of cleaning their surroundings, of setting tables and serving meals. So, yeah, I got a little paranoid.
Something about having urine thrown on me, being assaulted and bitten, having to get down in their blood and filth along with them caused me figure out I don’t want my shoes, my clothes, anything that went in there with me coming back into my house without a thorough cleaning.
And doing so kept me reasonably healthy for a long time. It has also kept me from getting colds and flu and constant infections others around me suffer. Some of what I learned also came from my family. People who believe cats should be allowed to walk on food preparation surfaces, to play in the bread box, the toilet. And people who think nothing of pulling out an item from a shed infested with rodents, brushing off the mountain of rat feces and then using the item at a picnic.
I cringe inside. I gag. I have been to the grocery and watched an old woman drool into the bin of fresh cherries. I’ve seen clerks pile the dirty floor mats in a shopping cart while they polish the tile at night. I have watched clerks pick up produce off the floor and use it to stock the bins, so yeah, I wash my fruit and veg–with soap. Every time.
I am careful about cross contamination on a large scale, having learned well from the restaurants where I have performed food service work. Those lessons dovetail nicely with learning to be meticulous in steps in scientific experiments, something I was already prone to by my nature.
Bags sit on a clean tarp in the back end of my car, not on the carpet where the recycling goes. I wipe down grocery carts at the store–not just the handle, the basket. Because I have worked in stores and I have been alive and aware in them and I see kids allowed to sit and stand where my food goes, placed in the cart with their filthy shoes, diapers and bodies in the food compartment. I don’t wipe anything on my own shoes and then use it, why would I do essentially the same thing with their shoes?
My family thinks I am crazy, but they already had that opinion from my other beliefs. This is only more fodder for the jokes and unwelcome, negative comments. My partner has come to see the good the cleaning has done for us and I am amused to suddenly see, on the news and on popular shows since the flu became a pandemic, the same advice being offered that I’ve been following for years.
There are too many people in the world, all too tired, too careless to not take precautions. Unlike what my mother believes, I am not a completely different person from the one I used to be. If she gave my whole self serious thought she’d see I’m exactly who I’ve always been. I am in the out of doors constantly, with my hands in the pool (and their excrement) to save the tadpoles, digging in the garden, working in all of the dirtiest areas I’ve always worked. I am just careful to wash, to watch where my clothes brush and keep what comes into the house or goes into my mouth clean.