Some people think cleaning up around a new house is pie for papa, but it isn't. There is none of that glamour you read about in "The Delights of Home" articles, and it isn't a thing on earth but a case of chuck the cuffs and collars and yield your soul to perspiration and persistence.
First, when you start to follow the carpenter into nooks and corners of the cellar and little hiding places in the top floor, you find that he has invented innumerable kinds of leavings, deftly tucked here and there where nobody but a second-sight man would ever figure on locating them. You begin to pick up and after you've stooped about two thousand times you remember the picture in the liver medicine ad., where the man stands with his hands on the small of his back, looking unhappy and pessimistic.
And it isn't only picking up, but it's cleaning out. What to do with the stuff bothers you. It's a cinch to burn the shavings and little pieces of wood and that kind of material, but you've got to deal again with bits of putty and glass and bent nails and tacks and other unburnable debris, and you hate to throw them into the bathtub because of the plumbing. You finally throw them out the window.
Later you realize that you threw them out unwisely. That's when you start to work on your lawn and side yard, and every time you stick in the trowel where you are setting out plants you fetch up a quart of junk. The astonishing lot of garbage they used to make the ground you stand on is bad enough, but with the things you've thrown out added to it the situation is exasperating.
You run your lawn mower over a nail, pick it up, and then wonder why providence ever let you get away from an early death, for sheer imbecility. It was the nail you picked up in the third floor and didn't know how to dispose of it. Pulling up a little bit of ground with your hands, to make a place for some dwarf nasturtium, you cut your finger with the piece of glass you threw out the side window. It's vexing. What to do with this wreckage a second time puzzles you, and you finally throw it over into the next lot. That's the time you find that your neighbor was watching you from his windows, and—it's not easy to be nice to people who throw their refuse over the lot line, is it?
But the worst of all this cleaning-up business is that your wife bosses the job.
Somehow or other, the man who loves his wife still draws the line at matrimonial dictatorship, even in so small a thing as picking up after the carpenter. Neither you nor your wife intended to let it go that far, and she really doesn't intend to go home to her mother, nor do you really intend to drown your domestic griefs in drink. But with some provocations man gets peevish and woman irritable.
The night before it had rained. Our back yard was soaked to the marrow, if a yard has a marrow. We had a wire stretched to mark our lot line and keep people off the grass seed and the garden. On the heels of the rain came one of the company drivers, took down the wire with deliberation and criminal purpose, and drove two goldarned mules and a wagon right through that yard, cutting ruts six inches deep and scattering parsnips, parsley, beans, peas, and lettuce all over the place. In a new development you have to stay at home twenty-four hours a day and yell at such people, or they'll have you rutted out of your possession.
It was pitiful to see those great ruts when we had worked so hard, and the torn-up garden with its sprouts here and there showing what it might have been. But it was more pitiful to see me walking around with a pocketful of manslaughter, looking for the driver who did it. Every driver on the place admitted that he didn't do it; so I came to the conclusion that it couldn't have been done at all. I was having delusions. The ruts and ruined gardens were figments of a disordered imagination.
Oh, well, what's the use?