The Answer My Friend,

Is Blowing Leaves Off The Deck

 I was speaking of my disaster-cleaning-fetish with Madison Taylor, one of the stalwart editors who grumpily manned the newsroom during the storm, when he admitted his wife also had been bitten by the cleaning bug when she heard Dennis was headed our way.

 My friend, Diane, my sister, my neighbor -- all of us reacted to the news of possible impending high winds and flooding by stripping our beds and putting clean sheets on them. As Diane told me, "Dennis may come, but all my laundry will be done before he gets here."

 I guess we're all trying to uphold a tradition. You know the one: Neither rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night shall deter...no, I'm sorry. That's the postal service. Mail delivery, not house scouring -- that's their specialty. Let's see, where was I?

 Oh yeah. There's something about impending doom that sends me and most of my female acquaintances into the throes of a cleaning frenzy. Dennis inspired me to catch up on all the laundry, polish the furniture and vaccum the entire house -- not once, but several times, with the unwilling and sullen assistance of my children.

"Mom, why are we vaccuming the upstairs again? We just did that yesterday," my daughter asked as she half-heartedly wheeled the vaccum into her bedroom.

 "Because we can," I said. And, actually, that really is the reason.

 While a clean house does wonders for my self-esteem, I feel even better about it when the electricity's interrupted for days on end. At least I can say I started out with a clean house, no matter how grubby it ends up.

 "Why are you mopping the floor when it's just going to get dirty again?" my husband asked as I mopped.

 "Why did you just blow all the leaves off the deck when it's just going to be piled with leaves again?" I countered.

 "Because it needed it," he said.

 "Ditto," I said.

 And, since the storm never put a damper on our electrical usage, I was able to vaccum and scrub right through Dennis and his rude encounter with our coastline. And even though I had three additional people trudging through the house on a normally quiet school day, when I climbed out of bed on Tuesday morning, my laundry was caught up, the carpets were relatively lintless and the dust level was at bay. Which goes to prove my point: if you stay on top of something, it won't get ahead of you. Well, most of the time, anyway.

 Unfortunately for my husband, the deck he so carefully stripped of leaves on Sunday was littered with thousands more on Monday. The next time we have a hurricane, I'm going to suggest he use my method and just stay on the deck with a gas-powered blower.

 It may not keep the leaves from piling up, but it'll sure make for a great column!

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