The bathroom is finally clean

I had a love-hate relationship with my childhood home.

The empty house this past winter

This was my brother's bedroom - the wall in the back is damaged because of a chimney fire.  We were happy kids.

My memories of that house are mostly good - feelings of being cozy, and warm, the house heated by two wood stoves before it was cool (and not bad for the environment) to burn wood.  Wood was our only source of heat, which resulted in a few chimney fires, one of which left a hole in the floor in one of the upstairs bedrooms that was never repaired.  Burning wood also kept us kid busy in the summer and fall, chopping wood and then piling it in the shed where the growing piles gave my dad a sense of happiness and providing for his family.

On school mornings, I woke up to the sound of my dad crinkling newspaper and the squeaking of the handle on the stove door as he threw in kindling to start the fire.  Then, the sizzling of snow on the big block of wood that would slowly but eventually warm up the house.  I  got up seeing my breath and hurried to put on my clothes.   My socks went on first because the floor was freezing cold.  ! went  downstairs with my brother and sister to “the room by the stove”.   The heater stove was the heart of the room, and it joined the kitchen stove  in its attempt to heat up the rest of the house. 

My mom brought us toast  and hot chocolate and we used the ironing board as a table and ate breakfast with our butts hot and itchy against the warming stove.   On snowy days we listened to Rudy Saari, and later, Jan Tucker, to see if school was canceled.  We could not see out of the big window in that room in the winter because frost covered it.  We didn’t have any insulation and the walls, as sturdy as they were (no particle board was used in its building)  did not keep out the wind and the cold.  Even if the view was not obscured by frost, it most likely was blocked by the snow that my dad piled high on the sides of the house, using it to provide some natural insulation. 

Winter weekend nights were often spent with all three of us kids and my mom snuggling on the couch watching The Twilight Zone, or Alfred Hitchcock.  The  kitchen door was always locked with a butter knife between the door frame and the wall.  It wasn’t much that house, but it was home.

The thing I hated most was that the bathroom was just off the kitchen.   The toilet often didn’t flush, especially if the pipes were frozen as they often were in the winter.  During my childhood there was never a sink or a shower in the bathroom, just a big galvanized oval tub that we filled up with water from the kitchen sink to bathe.   I grew up with “shy bowels” because if we had company I didn’t want to risk stinking up the kitchen or making embarrassing noises.

I lived in fear that my friends who came over would need to use the bathroom.  It often wasn’t very clean.  Someone would forget to flush the toilet or empty the tub which would leave it with gray, soapy, scummy water.   It was embarrassing for me to tell friends that they would have to wash their hands in the kitchen sink, so I usually rushed them out to wherever we were going before they asked to use the bathroom.

I longed for the  houses my friends had which while nice, were a far cry from the stucco monsters of today.  But they were clean and had a bathroom with a tub, sink and a toilet that always flushed.  That seemed so luxurious.

I grew up, got married and moved away and my mom and dad finally got a little sink and a shower in the bathroom. I never lost my preoccupation with bathrooms and became fanatic about cleaning my bathrooms before friends came over to our house.  I was plagued by dreams of trying to scrub the bathroom in that old house but could never  get it clean.  There were variations of this dream but in  the most common one,  I scrubbed and used a toothbrush around the base of the toilet but to no avail. Sometimes the toilet would be full and I could not flush it.  I had these dreams about two or three times per year usually when I was worried or stressed about something. 

The house is empty now and cold without it’s humans.  Houses seem to die, just like people do.  There isn’t a toilet in the bathroom and pretty much the rooms are filled with junk and our memories.  My dirty bathroom dreams began to take on a new form where I was living at the house in it’s abandoned condition, and still worried about the bathroom. 

Last night  I had a different variation.  Maybe it was created by my subconscious because lately I have been trying to let go, and to find closure in some areas of my life that have bothered me for several years.  Maybe it is because I have been researching my genealogy and came across a relative that I had never met - a person who seems to have a lot in common with me even though we grew up in differing generations and states. 

In this dream I was living in the cluttered lifeless house.  My parents were there and my dad was making coffee amidst all the clutter.  My parents did not talk to me; it’s as if I am invisible to them in all my dreams of them.  I will have to pursue that meaning some other time.

The dream began with a girl I didn’t know, but yet did,  showing up and wanting to stay with me.  I told her she could and was trying to find a place for her to sleep.  Meanwhile my brother was walking around with no clothes on and peeing on everything and I was yelling at him and he refused to get dressed.  He was drunk and became belligerent.  I yelled at him to move his clothes to another bedroom so I would have room for this girl.  He refused.

The next morning this unknown girl came up to me and said,

“That bathroom is terrible”, she said.   “You need to do something about it”. 

“I have tried for years” I replied.

“Only you can do it”, she said, and then left.

I went into the bathroom.  It was way worse than it ever was in reality, but I began scrubbing the bowl and it started actually getting clean and white.  Feeling better, I started hauling pieces of lumber and odds and ends that were stacked against the walls and on the floor to a large garage full of more junk.  When I went back in I took my toothbrush and got all the dirt out from around the toilet. 

I left the bathroom just in time to run into some businessmen who wanted to have a meeting in the now clean bathroom. 

The unknown girl came back, this time with my college roommate, Sue. 

“Get dressed” Sue said.  “We are going to have some beers”.  “And who is that girl”, she asked.

“I don’t know” I said, and we tried to find her drivers license in her purse.

I had to rummage through old boxes to find an old t-shirt that said “Sweet Honesty” on it.  I actually did have one like this that my sister got me from empty Virginia Slim cigaret packages.  I put it on and went out into the car.  I remember feeling dirty because of all my cleaning.

Sue was driving, the unknown girl was sitting in the middle and my friend Ramona was sitting next to her.  I briefly wondered how Ramona got there.  We headed off to wherever we were going for beer.

I suddenly noticed that there were three dirty little barefoot kids sitting next to me and my pantless brother was sitting next to them. 

“They are not going to let you kids in the bar without shoes” I said, ignoring my pantsless brother. 

I woke up thinking that maybe the meaning of this dream was:

It’s good to have honest friends who tell it like it is.  It’s good to have friends who want to help you by buying youbeer.  Sometimes despite everything else, you are the only one who can fix something.
You can fix one thing, but there will always be something else - like three little kids with bare feet

and a naked brother in your car when you want to go have a beer.
Life is about fixing things and maybe some of them just don’t need to be fixed
If businessmen want to meet in your bathroom, it is clean enough

Maybe I am enough.  The bathroom is finally clean.  I can go forward and clean other rooms now.