air freshener

Raise your hand if you love vacuum cleaner salesmen.

Okay, that was the wrong question.  Of course you love everybody.  Raise your hand if you love being the target of a vacuum cleaner salesman's sales pitch.

I thought not.

It was early afternoon. I had had a very good day.  I'd fed all the children twice, finished their school, read them a stack of books, and I was just finishing cleaning up the house in preparation for a couple of hours of me time when the doorbell rang.  I considered ignoring it and pretending I was deaf or not home.  My children ran to open the door and cut off my escape.  Shoot.

"We're giving out free samples of Glade air freshener in your neighborhood," the man at the door said, waving a bottle around.  "Can I give you a demonstration?"

Now. You just thought the same thing I did.  Let him come in, spray the headache-inducing stuff in the air, and he'll be gone.  Yes?  No.  Before I knew it, another man and a woman were unloading boxes and boxes of vacuum cleaner parts into my living room.  I stood holding the door open, gaping in horror and watching my beautiful afternoon of sewing melting away.  "Can I give you a demonstration."  He hadn't said a demonstration of what, and I'd said yes.  I had cleared a rare block of time in a busy-mom schedule for...a vacuum cleaner sales pitch. 

I'd been advertised to in this manner before.  Years ago, a vacuum cleaner saleslady scheduled an appointment with us, and we unsuspectingly let her come.  After spending three hours listening to a pitch about an impossibly expensive machine that could lift us from the abject filth the saleslady was mortified to discover we lived in, Father Bird and I swore we'd never let another vacuum cleaner salesperson in the door. 

Anybody whose sales angle is "Your life is so miserably disgusting without this machine that costs as much as a couple months' mortgage," is, although I love everybody as much as you do, not welcome in my house.  I went around for weeks after the first saleslady came, depressed about the filthy house I was raising my poor children in.  I pulled out my cheap Hoover and sadly vacuumed the floor, now with the knowledge that underneath what I could vacuum up was an unbearably nasty layer of grunge that I couldn't. 

And then a wonderful thing happened.  We packed our bags and went on vacation to Yosemite.  First, I slept in a tent for a week.  That by itself helped a lot.  But the real "aha!" moment came here:

when we visited the indian village, and discovered that people had been living decent lives long before whoever invented those expensive vacuum cleaners was born.  The park guide did mention that the redwood that these huts were built out of didn't rot and did "deter bugs", but do you see that dirt floor?  Those gaps between the siding?  These people were raising children in there!  With...dirt! And insects! And...and dust mites!  And...

No vacuum cleaner salesmen. 

I stood in the doorway of that frightening little house, and I thought about the people who once lived there.  Did they let their children crawl around on the dirt floor?  What choice did they have?  Did they...sleep...on that floor?  Where else would they sleep?  Did they love, laugh with friends, watch the sunset, hold their babies, and enjoy living life in these huts?  Somehow I bet they did.  Did anybody ever come to them with a stack of pristine white coffee filters, strap each one over the end of a vacuum cleaner hose, and show these people how horrible their lives were?  Not a chance.

So it was with a more philosophical air that I watched the salesman that had sneaked his way into my house with the air freshener. He laid filter after filter of the family filth in tidy rows on my living room carpet, his lips compressing tighter every time.  He gave me the bottom line, and the pitch was the same.  You understand now how disgusting your life is, and if you're not willing to pay this much for a vacuum cleaner you're a terrible housekeeper. 

And I thought, just to myself, I bet for that price I could buy myself a nice villa in Yosemite.

~MB~