CAREGIVING: Thursday Dilcia came back today after a two-week absence. She comes on Thursdays, so she was off on Thanksgiving. Then she was sick last week after and they frown upon sending sneezing workers into the homes of vulnerable seniors held together with duct tape. So the house needed her cleaning attention. I try to keep up with it and Melissa usually runs the vacuum on the carpets when she has time. But I didn’t do much dusting.
Dilcia is going to tell her agency that during the winter she’ll only take clients close by, like us. She is 22, I think she said, but this is her first year of having a driving license, it turns out. She doesn’t want to drive with the yahoos on the snowy highway. Home health care workers don’t make much money, to begin with, and her agency sends her to one-hour assignments. So she could spend more time driving in her car than actually doing care. She has a full-time job at an assisted living place in the mornings and the home stuff is extra.
She is really pretty funny. With a bit of work and a lot of confidence, she could do stand-up comedy. Her musical tastes are pretty eclectic too. Her playlist on her phone plays a mixture of country, rock and reggaeton with an occasional hip hop or rap stuck in. She’ll sing along sometimes in English; sometimes in Spanish. Anyway, I’ve learned how to clean from her. I do hate to delegate unpleasant tasks. I’m not very direct about asking her to do stuff like mop the floor or the bathroom. When I did ask her to mop the kitchen floor she asked where the mop was. I pointed to the sponge mop in the broom closet. She said “That’s not a mop. That’s a thing to spread the dirt and mud around with!” So I got her a regular cotton one.
To be honest I feel like I need to clean the house before she comes. It’s a neurosis I picked up from my mother. My mother had a Finnish woman, Ellen, who came once a week to help her do stuff. Mom would always get up early to clean before she came to clean. As Ellen got older and could no longer really see, my mom would give her old clothes to iron because she was burning them all. When she vacuumed, she never plugged anything back in. It drove my dad crazy. Dilcia got a lot done and said she expected it to be a lot worse than it was. She used our dustbuster to do some of the dusting and to get rid of some of the spider webs we have. She even vacuumed Marty. He loves the dustbuster for some reason. Kathy was too tired to do her exercises or at least I didn’t push her hard enough to do them.