“I bought a mop today. Tomorrow I think I’ll mop my whole apartment.”
“We should clean rug. We will do it now.”
“Oh, no no, it’s alright. Thank you though. I’ll clean it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? What tomorrow? We clean it now. In snow. Come.”
“…what? In the snow? But… but… how? And it’s dark?”
“We beat it. In snow. Come.”
I roll up the rug and we head outside.
[outside]
It’s dark. It’s snowing. It is, of course, cold.
“So…” I glance around, trying to sort out exactly what is about to occur. Alas, my imagination fails me. “Okay. How does this work?”
“Like this.”
With an expert hand, my companion rolls the carpet (all 15×2 feet of it – it’s an odd carpet, what can I say) out onto a suitably “clean” snowdrift.
The carpet cuts a long dark line through the snow, and I briefly contemplate the choices that led me to be outside in 15 degree weather, partially blinded by the driving snow, with a 50-something Ukrainian woman, who looks remarkably like a bear in her massive fur coat and matching hat.
“Now. We walk on it.”
“We…huh?”
“We walk. Then it will be clean.”
What followed this pronouncement struck me more as a mystic ceremony meant to invoke some ancient god of carpet cleaning, an intricate stamp and twist dance not accurately described by the simple verb “to walk.” Still, I joined in, energetically stomping and moving about with my bear-like dance partner, glancing every so often at the myriad of apartment windows facing the courtyard, and wondering what this would look like from a lofty height of four or five stories.
A short while later, the ritual was complete. We each grabbed one end of the long carpet and “did the wave” with it. My “wave” skills are sorely lacking, and I lost hold of my end not once, but twice. My carpet cleaning partner waited (with what I can only assume is the Ukrainian equivalent of a long-suffering expression at my ineptitude) while I fetched my end out of the snow.
Carpet successfully “cleaned” we headed back inside.
Oh Cеменівка.
