November 18, 2025November 18, 2025

What Is It With Housecleaning?

Man holding vacuum cleaner in a dance pose

CAN SOMEONE FIND INNER PEACE, BETWEEN SQUEAKY-CLEAN AND CLUTTERED?

Editorial warning: This is a first world problem story.

The housekeeping people just left my apartment. Happy as I am to see them arrive, I am sixteen times happier to see them go.

It’s an every other week ritual. The hyper-efficient housekeepers trained and provided by my senior living building appear with their cart-load of sweepers, dusters, mops and vacuum cleaners and swarm my otherwise happy home. The exorbitant fees I pay to live in this place (where DO old people in the U.S. go if they don’t have a zillion dollars? — that’s another story) actually cover housekeeping once a week. But I find the experience so traumatizing I elect to have them only every other week. I am still waiting for the small rebate I feel due for all the $$ I save them.

Why the trauma? It’s because I have to zoom around before they arrive, making sure there’s nothing in the way of their Marie-Kondoing the place. Never mind that I do a lot of cleaning, arranging and tidying up every day; I have a lot of company. But whereas my visitors would overlook a small pile of stuff on the table or even the occasional toothbrush on the sink, our housekeepers may whoosh it away forever in the frenzy to maintain their standards of spit-and-polish. The housekeepers here are, I believe, recruited from the military.

Well, anyway. After they finish sweeping, mopping, dusting, wiping down, vacuuming and generally disturbing the peace, my work begins.

Bottles at the backs of counters, invariably left just a few degrees askew, must be rearranged in proper alignment. Pictures must be rescued from their descent into lopsidedness. Books and treasures must be restored to their rightful places. And — here is the real bi-weekly challenge — everything I shoved into cabinets or drawers just so it wouldn’t wind up in the recycling bin must be recovered from its hiding place. This last is not always successful. After I die it is likely someone will be heard to exclaim, “Why in the world did Mom put this basket of popcorn behind the stack of sweaters in her closet?”

Here is my question: What law of the universe ordains that the square bottle of hand lotion be positioned squarely against the back counter ledge?

For that matter, will the earth quit turning if pillows meant to be placed at angles on the sofa are left in improper poses? Will climate change be accelerated even faster if glass vases are left to refract the suns rays rather than being restored to positions of predestined alignment?

Marie Kondo I am not. I am just still in recovery from the loss of an otherwise spectacularly beloved husband who never saw a flat space he did not feel would be improved by a few piles of books, magazines and papers. I maintain a few perpetual piles of papers on at least two or three surfaces at all times in his memory. But of course, then I have to remember that I stuck them behind the laundry detergent when the cleaners came.

And the popcorn? Yeah, did that once. Bulky sweaters are rarely called for in San Francisco. I am not admitting in public print how long the popcorn remained undiscovered. (It was soggy. We don’t have mice in this building.)

There is probably a moral to this tale. All suggestions will be welcome.

* * *

This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye (franmorelandjohns.substack.com) where I also write weekly about things political. C’mon over any time; it’s free

America Collection/General interest

August 11, 2025August 11, 2025

On Wiping Egg(dirt) Off of My Face

by Fran Johns

WHEREUPON THE MYSTERY OF THE 7th FLOOR WINDOW IS, MEANWHILE, SOLVED

Shiny new view from balcony window – facing south (Author photo)

Once a year we get shiny-clean windows.

It used to be twice a year, as my original contract decreed — but this is a senior living building, and senior living is, unfortunately, Very Big Business in the U.S. Which means investors want steadily rising returns, and this only happens by increasing rents (constantly) or by cutting costs (regularly, as in less frequent window-washing.)

OK, now that’s off my chest.

I love shiny-clean windows. The south-facing ones (above) stay reasonably clean all year. But my apartment has one large west-facing window, a view of reflected sunrises and shimmering sunsets. I really love my west-facing window. Its view succumbs to the grime of Post Street traffic below, but that takes a while to accumulate and Mother Nature sometimes pitches in with winter gales to clean things up.

Sunset view from west window (Author photo, long ago)

So it was with great dismay that I discovered, after the window-washers had finished the western wall and moved around the corner, that half of my west window remained smudgy.

In the grand scheme of things, a smudgy window would seem to rank fairly low among what one needs to complain about. But this is my waking view of the world, my closing view of the starlit night. Must it be gloomy, even before the San Francisco fog and embers from Canadian wildfires turn the window into a metaphor for a darkening world? (Until rays of hope return with the window-washers next August, just before the mid-terms?)

The prospect was too terrible. I complained. I complained vociferously to management, to housekeeping, to the maintenance department; for good measure. I fired off an email to the Executive Director of this establishment. One should not have to suffer a grungy half-view of the world for an entire year, I argued. Send those window washers up here to witness my distress. (I knew better than to insist on a re-do; I know costs and investor returns. I wanted, at the very least, sympathy — and at best a wash from within. These windows can be popped out for such chores.)

The offending window, west view (Author photo)

The next day a charming window-washer appeared at my door. “I actually washed that window,” he smiled. “I take pride in my work, so I’m always careful that it’s well done. Do you mind if I take a look?”

I felt heard. I sensed recompense. I led the charming window-washer to the offending window. “Do you mind?” he asked again, as he leaned across the three-foot shelf that sets the window back from the room, between built-in bookcases.

That small smudge you see on the right window (between the edges of the two sliding panes?) That is where the exonerated window-washer rubbed his two fingers. I seemed to have a very dirty window — on the inside.

Next week maintenance is sending someone to perch on the three-foot shelf and wash the inside of my window — something I’m perfectly capable of doing myself, but then, all this never occurred to me before raising such a ruckus so they may not think I have enough sense to wash a window.

May your sunrises shimmer and your sunsets glow. And may your outlook never be grungy.

Health/Money

July 27, 2009

Waterfront Condos: More on the housing dilemma

by Fran Johns

Waterfront esplanade, expansive views from a sunny terrace, walk to the ballpark — what’s not to love about this housing choice?

Downsizing from a large, Victorian house filled to overflowing with the accumulations of two very active lives, the Langleys of San Francisco decamped, a few months ago, to a new, easy-care, sun-filled two-bedroom condo in the city’s happening-place Mission Bay neighborhood. They love the convenience, the mix of ages and cultures, the freedom from old-house maintenance worries and some unexpected bonuses like new friends living on houseboats from another era who are within conversation range of their 4th floor deck. “We (the new condo development) block the view they used to have all those years,” Judy Langley says, “but there are a lot of trade-offs like getting the creek (which leads into San Francisco Bay) cleaned up, and the park over there…” For the newcomers, the young dog-walkers on the esplanade below, the middle-aged Chinese couple doing tai chi on the common lawn, it is an urban idyll.

Urban condos, even those without kayaks at the door and aged houseboats for neighbors, are an increasingly popular answer to the downsizing dilemma. But the dilemma remains huge and answers are seldom easy.

On the day the Langleys were hosting an Open House in their new digs, my sister was packing the last boxes from the high-ceilinged Boston condo that’s been her family’s home for decades. She and her husband are headed for a New York retirement community to which a physician daughter will also relocate from the west coast. Elsewhere this weekend a childhood friend was finalizing plans for a move from Northern Virginia to a coastal community where her husband will be able to live in a Memory Unit while she lives independently nearby.

These choices typify the variety of factors that go into contemporary downsizing decision-making: Is it affordable? Will I (or my parents) have the care that’s needed? Can life still be good (or even get better?)

And any of these families might also have considered co-housing. Yet another option for Boomers and Beyonders as well as for younger families and individuals, co-housing in some ways harkens back to a simpler, long-ago lifestyle and in other ways could only work in the 21st century. It was the topic of an OWL-sponsored panel discussion on Saturday, and will be tomorrow’s Boomers and Beyond topic.