Many of these ads blare an announcement about “one weird old trick” that will help you reduce your belly fat, save on car insurance, make your boobs look bigger or get your husband to clean the gutters (or the eavestroughs, if you are in Canada.) O.K., I made up that last one (not the eavestrough part.)
Have you seen these ads? Ever opened one of them? My
curiosity about belly fat got the better of me one day and I did. I got a video
that went on and on and never got to the point before I got bored and pressed
Exit, but I think it was headed toward selling me some acai berry juice. I’m not sure if the acai berry is also a cure
for high priced car insurance or flat chestedness, but it isn’t likely that I’ll
find out because I won’t be opening any more weird old trick ads. I’m
disappointed the ads are so mundane because the words, “weird old trick” were
rather evocative to me. I imagined misshapen old crones conjuring potions and chanting verses like
Shakespeare’s weird sisters in the Scottish play— eye of newt and toe of frog
and all that — and “Poof” – gone are those love handles you’ve been
nurturing for the last twenty years. So,
I got to thinking about other weird old trick applications. Like, wouldn’t it
be nice if there was an instant remedy for housework? I hate housework. Sure it’s
nice when things are sparkling fresh, but I just haven’t got the energy most
days to go fill a bucket with hot water and clean something. This line of
thinking got me to channeling Betty.
Betty lived next door to us in our 1950s neighborhood in
suburban Richmond, British Columbia. This was the first house we bought, which was
in 1984 when we had been married a mere 7 years. Betty and her husband, Jon,
had lived in their 1957 rancher since it was brand new. They had raised their
three kids who had flown the coop as it were and Jon had taken to raising
chickens, and they were thinking about their retirement years tooling around in
a Winnebago. Betty and Jon kind of
adopted us “newlyweds.” They gave us helpful advice on gardening and general home
ownership. Betty did a little sewing for
me and came in some afternoons to let out our Irish setter who loved to bark at
the chickens causing Jon to install a higher fence. If Jon happened to walk along the side of his
house that was next to our over-the-sink kitchen window and if I was preparing
chicken for dinner, I would hold up a leg and point to the dog. It always made
him look back and count his flock.
Jon gave us “spent” tulip bulbs that he took from the city
works yard where he worked as a machinery repair man. He knew spent tulip bulbs
from viable ones because he had grown them in his native Holland before coming
to Canada in the 50s. He hated to see good tulip bulbs go to waste. I think he
told me once that they had to eat them during WWII. Jon and Betty had a couple
of thousand tulips in their yard — glorious in the springtime. However, I
digress.
Betty told me that her mother-in-law had taken her aside when
she got married in Holland in order to give her some marital advice. Betty
expected it would be about you- know-what. But instead, Jon’s mother told her that
if she didn’t feel like cleaning her house she should wait for a windy day,
open up all her windows and let the breeze blow all the dirt away.
Perfect! Love that
idea! So, on a lovely spring day recently when the wind was gusty, I thought of
Betty and decided to try her one weird old trick. I never feel like cleaning and
I do love a good breeze blowing through the house — so I opened all the windows
as wide as they would go. Mistake! Over the course of the day, the wind blew in
a fine dusting of dirt that settled on every window sill, floor, appliance, counter,
piece of furniture and knick-knack in the house. Worst was the bathroom where I have a window
box that had not yet been planted for the summer. Our normally all-white tiled
bathroom had a covering of black specks of dirt from top to bottom from the spray
of soil. It looked like black dandruff.
And even worse was the fact that I didn’t have a vacuum
cleaner. I discovered this when I went to retrieve it from the basement floor
where it lay in a heap from the ass-kicking it got one day when I got totally
fed up with its canister’s total reluctance to follow me. We had never gotten
along, the vacuum and I. I let it “fall” down the stairs, cursing at it for
being a useless, rotten, crummy, impossible-to-operate piece of poo. Now it was
dead. And I wasn’t sorry. But I was stuck with sweeping up dirt in the bathroom
with a hand-held whisk and dust pan.
The cleaning ladies came the next day. They’re my idea of an
old trick – although they’re not that weird. Nice girls, really.
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