On dusting

Sometimes when I’m cleaning, I think of the couple on a cross-country tour of bookstores that stopped in early in my tenure and proclaimed us a dust-free store. You wouldn’t believe how dusty some stores are! they said. And now, five years later, I still feel like I need to live up to their standards. Get the baseboards, all the corners, behind the displays, under the tables. The dead flies in the windows, the cobwebs in the radiators. Fingerprints and tape residue on the windows, mud tracked in front of the card rack. Hair unwound from the base of the vacuum. Tiny rocks kicked up from the sidewalk that need to be retrieved by hand, meticulous, meticulous.