Art Shows and Cleaning Girls

I died and went to Cleaning Girl Heaven. The one I had---the girl who gave a baby up in an open adoption and ended up regretting her decision---started taking Fridays off and she wanted me to change my cleaning day to Saturdays. I didn’t want to do that because there are too many art fairs, fall festivals and kids’ birthday parties scheduled on my upcoming Saturdays. After her boss and I tried to work out another day and time when we’d both be free at the same time, we gave up and decided it was time for me to try someone new. I felt bad because my old cleaner is such a sympathetic figure with a basket full of issues, one of which is she’s an OCD cleaning machine who, if she’d been a dog groomer, would have found a way to scrub the spots off a Dalmatian. 

The new girl came this week, a college kid in a grad program down at the art institution. My heart be still! She wants to be an art professor and already she’s got the demeanor and look of a professor. A tall, willow-thin blonde with a wide smile that makes you want to smile back. We talked painting styles, artists and mediums as she worked, and she’s the first cleaning person I’ve had in the five years since I’ve been using the service who actually appreciates my favorite room in the house---the library. She had a reverence for my art, philosophy and women’s history books. I don’t have my cleaners clean in my art room but I showed it to her and she gave me some technical advice with a painting that I’ve been struggling to finish. She said I’m only six brush strokes away from accomplishing what I need to do. That sure made my day because I’ve been weighing the idea of doing the entire face over. Her cleaning job was not as thorough as my other girl's and I probably won’t have her for long because after graduation she’ll be moving on, but in the meantime I’ll have something to look forward to besides having a clean house on the first Friday of every month. By the way, I always buy my house fresh flowers to celebrate the occasion. A clean house and fresh flowers go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Saturday I went to an annual Art in the Park show with one goal in mind: Don’t buy anything. Not even a greeting card which I have a ‘thing’ for doing when I like an artist. You can always find room for another greeting card, right? I rarely send those cards to anyone. I hoard them and enjoy them whenever I’m looking for something to use for the purpose cards were invented. So many charities send me packets of greeting cards that my stash seems to grow like mushrooms in the dark. I have a chest of six drawers (one foot square drawers) where I keep gift wrapping supplies and greeting cards and recently I downsized the cards in that chest to pass on to one of my Gathering Girls pals. She’ll pass them on to another friend of hers who does prison ministry work and that woman hands out packets of pre-stamped greeting cards to the prisoners for them to use. The woman has been visiting prisons for decades and wouldn’t you like to know the back story on how she got started doing that. I wish I was self-less enough to send those prisoners cards from my ‘good’ stash---they might enjoy hanging some beautiful mini-art pieces in their cells---but I’m not there yet. If reincarnation is real, in my next go-around I want to think more like Mother Theresa and less like---well, like me. 

The weather for the art show was perfect. The temperature was in the high 60s and a breeze was coming off the near-by river where ducks and white swans were looking for their lunch and Canadian geese were resting on their way up north. The signs of fall approaching were all around me and the bright sun was doing a great job of showing off the pieces of artists working in stained glass.

I’ve gone completely nuts about wind chimes this summer---Ya, I’m one of those annoying neighbors, some would say, who loves the pinging tones and tinkling sounds of glass, metal and sea shells striking one another in the wind. In my defense my neighbors aren’t close enough to hear them. At the art show, I fell in love with a four foot long copper and stained glass wind chime that was probably too heavy to make a peep unless a hurricane is one the way. I admired the heck out of it, complimented the artist, lied and told her my (non-existent) condo doesn’t allow wind chimes "otherwise I’d adopt that beautiful piece." And then I walked away. Aren’t you proud of me? I am. Well, except for the lying part. Mother Theresa, I doubt, ever lied just to make an excuse for not buying something so beautiful that it takes your breath away. I just wish the artist had sold greeting card depictions of her work. After all, I recently created extra space in my card drawers and it would have been easy to hide the evidence of breaking my goal about not buying anything that day. ©