My garage is clean thanks to freshman speech

This morning my husband thanked me, unsolicited, for launching the Great Garage Clean-Up of 2011. Last weekend we swapped out winter sleds for summer bikes, rock salt for weed-and-feed, and swept out the road cinders and dead bugs that accumulated over the long winter.

The toughest task was tackling his toolboxes – five of them – and organizing the tools. When we were done, he was amazed to find he had three full sets of the same kind of sockets. I was not so amazed, but I ended the day happy because if I need a screwdriver or hammer I know where to look.

I was thinking about the clean-up on my drive to work this morning. Several (okay, many) years ago I enrolled in a tiny liberal arts college in Nebraska. It was my first semester and I had freshman speech. A young classmate told us that she intended to be a housewife and hadn’t planned to go to college. But when her husband returned from the first Gulf War he decided to get a degree. As a married student he had the option of getting a nicer dorm – an apartment, really – if his wife went to college with him. So they both enrolled.

One day, this young woman stood in front of the class, as nervous as the rest of us, and delivered a five-minute instructional speech on how to clean a house. She said she didn’t feel like she had much to contribute, but that housecleaning was something she knew how to do well. Her instructions went something like this:

1. Start small. Start with the smallest room in your house and clean it. The sense of accomplishment will help you move on to the next smallest room.
2. Start high. Start by dusting off the highest points of the room – the light fixtures, ceiling fan blades, etc. Then move down to the next highest thing, like window sills and counters. Do the floors last so you pick up all the dirt that fell from the higher spots.
3. Pick a corner and work your way out of it. Instead of being overwhelmed by clutter (say in a basement storage area) start in one corner of the room and work on only those items in that corner. Once it’s clean, move to the next section of the wall. Work your way around the room and at the end everything will have its place.

It’s hard to believe it’s been so long since I sat in that classroom. I transferred to another school after my first semester and lost touch with the people I’d met. But I think about the young woman from my freshman speech class every so often. I wonder if she graduated, if she stayed married, if she had children, if she started a career or made a career at home. I wonder if she remembers the speech she gave – the simple speech that’s helped me clean my rooms, organize my husband’s tools, and keep things neat around the house for the past twenty years.