The house we live in was built in 1948. It still has the original drafty, single-pane steel casement windows that it came with.

While I’m not as assiduous a housekeeper as I was in my youth, I still do make an attempt to keep things clean and tidy. But in this house it’s a never-ending battle against dust. It seems like I wipe everything down, and two days later everything is covered again. So I get disheartened at this and two days often turns into two weeks. I used to visit my Dad and was aghast at layers of dust covering everything in his house. “I just don’t have the energy any more. I start cleaning and give up halfway through.” I couldn’t understand it then, but now being close to the age he was when he told me that, it’s becoming abundantly clear.

And yes, we’ve discussed hiring someone to come in and clean…

My office is an especially bad dust magnet, although the living room—where the majority of our tchotchkes reside—is a close second.  One of my office doors leads directly into the laundry room and that in turns opens directly to the back yard. Our back yard is basically bare dirt most of the year with a small patch of grass that has somehow managed to survive under the shade of the single elm tree that sits just off the patio.

If the yard alone weren’t enough to send clouds wafting in through our even-when-closed drafty windows, when Raffi gets the zoomies, his favorite activity outside is to tear around in all that dirt doing doggy donuts.

Since we moved back in here I’ve been threatening to hit a home improvement store and buy a few dozen rolls of stick-on foam weatherstrip and line the inside edge of every window in the house…but I still haven’t gotten around to it. After going through the place yesterday and wiping everything down yet again, I really need rethink the urgency and get to the task sooner rather than later because spending the better part of a single day dusting is not my idea of a good time. BUT… if I don’t get around to it before the end of January, it will be one of my immediate post-retirement projects.