Taking a Trip Down Memory Lane While Housecleaning

Here at Nogglestead, we do not dust and clean our varied myriad surfaces with the finest skins of virgin chamois from the Carpathian Mountains nor with the finest microfiber cloths from Price Cutter. Instead, we used cut-up t-shirts as dust rags.

Which makes every housecleaning chore akin to looking through an old album of photos in the triggering of memory.

To whit:

• 

  This Bleed Blue cloth was a free giveaway at a St. Louis Blues playoff hockey game around the turn of the century. Afterwards, it served as a burp cloth for one or more of my children. After the children stopped spitting up after a bottle, it went unaltered into the cabinet for dusting.

• This cloth comes from a long sleeved t-shirt that was also a giveaway at a Blues game. Although both I and my beautiful wife received them, I gave mine to her as well as I didn’t wear long-sleeved t-shirts for a long time. This particular cloth is getting holed and worn, and I’ll probably toss it to make room for more t-shirts with structural integrity failures.
• This black rag comes from the Queensrÿche Empire t-shirt I got for Christmas from Chris and/or Deb in 1990. I sometimes wore it under an open collared shirt as was not in style at the time, but was how I wore t-shirts.
• This grey cloth comes from a sleeveless Marquette University shirt I bought in the middle 1990s, after I graduated and when I was on a return visit to Milwaukee. I wore a lot of sleeveless shirts at that time, which is odd, because I didn’t really have the physique to support it.
• This t-shirt comes from one of my son’s Martial Arts USA t-shirts. He’d owned it for less than a year before getting caught in the crossfire of a gangland paintball/hamburger condiment fight accompanied by the explosion of an Italian restaurant kitchen. The only thing missing was grass stains from when he threw himself to the ground and slid down a hill into a muddy creek at the bottom, but there’s always his new white Orlando souvenir t-shirt for that. This particular memory does not very far back, but the memories of repeatedly trying to de-stain it remain.

I mean, sure, I’ve got a bin of worn old undershirts that I could use for this, but the old t-shirts provide me with something to think about when cleaning. Aside from wondering when the last time I’ll clean yogurt from the crown molding will come and how much I’ll miss it when it does.