Breathing in some of the past

This week we had some fall weather blow into Florida. Well, fall weather by Florida standards. That is to say, we received a dip in our temperatures. Instead of 92-degree weather we got 86 degree weather with a nice breeze to go along with our sunshine.

This lasted three days and it was wonderful. I even slept with my bedroom window open. (That occurred because I put some cheap Drano cleaner down my shower drain and obnoxious killer fumes raced throughout our house causing me to have to open all the windows in the house. That is when we discovered the evening temperature had dropped a bit and a nice fall breeze was blowing. Thus we kept the bedroom one opened all night)

On the second day the weather was so delightful I decided to clean my van. It was in such dirty shape that I couldn't even see what color my vehicle was behind all the dirt and grime. I don' t think it had been washed since the beginning of summer.

After I returned from the gym on Thursday (the day after my exciting Obama day) I got out my iHome and hooked up my iPod. I got out the buckets, the soap, the rag, and the vacuum. I removed the protective carpeting we have inside and I vacuumed it, scrubbed it with carpet cleaner, hosed it down and hung it over my fence to dry. I washed all the windows inside and used Clorox wipes on all the washable surfaces. Then I vacuumed the entire car from ceiling to floor. That took over an hour, but I was still feeling so fine working hard in this crisp Florida weather.

When I had finished with the inside I took all of the belongings that shouldn't have been in my van in the first place and put them in their correct places inside the house. I had some water. I got out the hose and cleaned the outside of my car. About the time I was on my haunches scrubbing at the hubcaps I got to thinking about how tired I was and about how much I disliked cleaning cars. That got me to thinking about my neighbors in Indiana. These people really knew how to clean cars.

There were three kids in the family and once a month or so the kids were assigned the duty of cleaning the family car. It was an all day project. They cleaned and scrubbed and used toothbrushes to clean inside every groove and crevice you could see. There was no swishing and swiping on their car. They would clean the inside and then move to the outside. They would finish up with a good wax job just about the time the sun went down and then they would clean up their mess. Some of us neighborhood kids would start out helping, but by the time we realized we weren't going to get to play with the hose and buckets of suds first we were history.

As they got older they went from the family car to their own cars. I never understood this obsession with the car cleaning. I cleaned my car, but not like these three cleaned a car. Seriously, you could eat off the underside of their car when it was finished.

As I stared at the dirt down in the crevice of the sliding door of my van that I had no intention of even tackling I wondered if they still were like that. I wondered too if they had passed that gene down to their own children.

Better yet I wondered if they would be interested in a Florida fall vacation...