Today, I had a maid come and clean my apartment.
Is was weird.
After a morning of perusing the after-school sales put on by departing students, I returned home to find a plastic bag sitting on my front porch. Wondering what it was, I carefully peeled back the edges to find a repulsive heap of garbage from beneath my kitchen sink. It was then, I knew Wendy was there. I pushed open the unlocked door to find a smiling Caribbean woman with a broom in her hands and bandana keeping the dust out of her hair.
I had met Wendy a few days before when she arrived on my doorstep with a bucket of cleaning supplies and a desire to scrub my floors. Unfortunately that was also the day our apartment took the brunt of the crate explosion after our supplies were shipped over from England.
Yes, my house was so messy that I was embarrassed to admit the housekeeper.
She was very understanding and said that she would just come back later that week.
The cleaning service is one that is included in our little pittance of rent each month along with a few other deals that make this tightwad happy.
Wendy has her own key and scrubs everything from the sinks to the toilet to the glass-top tables. If my counter is not too cluttered with crap, she will wipe that as well. She also sweeps and mops all 50 square feet of our all-tile-floored apartment.
Alright, maybe our apartment is not 50 square feet small, but it is close. There is not much to clean other than the floors, which is nice.
For her effort, Wendy demanded nothing more than a glass of water and that I stay out of the way. It only felt right to offer her something to eat, but she politely refused and went back to washing my windows.
The service, which is paid for by the apartment complex, is surely putting food on Wendy’s table – a big thing in a country as poor as Grenada.
However, I just can’t get over the idea of someone else cleaning my house. From the time I was a little girl, cleaning was a job that belonged to no one but the home owner.
Also, scouring has somehow become a right of passage as we move into a new place. Once touched by my magic gloved hand, the shower becomes ours. Any dirt that gets on that thing after the initial move-in cleaning is now our dirt, a pure form of scum that is somehow more clean than that left by the previous occupant.
We are living in a strange new world here. I guess someone else cleaning my house is just another aspect of Grenada to know and love.
