Paused To Play

Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.
5 hours ago
1 min read

Last year I vacuumed my lovely living room area rug and today is the day that I will vacuum it again. This involves moving chairs and tables to get at this year's dust, which will cause me pain in my hands and feet, shoulders, back, and hips. The pain is pretty much everywhere, moving around makes it worse. I know that my rug has stains from spills when a glass or plate jittered in my old hand or I dropped something but I hope that I do not discover any damage to my expensive, beautiful rug, especially scuffs or stains from the maintenance men who have been too often in my apartment to fix this, that, or the other of this seventy-year old apartment complex (mostly to patch together the plumbing and heating (these HUD* units have no air conditioning.) Maintenance refused to wear protective paper booties on their work boots, said it was against their policy. One man stood in his dirty work boots in the middle of my rug and complimented me, "This is a really nice rug."

If I can gather the courage to do it (I did), I plan to sit on my rug while I vacuum it, dragging furniture as I go. This is a plan so overwhelming that I have paused to play at the pleasant preoccupation of creating an abstract and then an illustration of my rug. Here they are:

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* HUD is (Department of) Housing and Urban Development.

Today I Am Vacuuming My Living Room Area Rug