Ignore the five-year-old version of me on the left, and ignore my freaking perfect cousin Cindy on the right.
Focus your attention instead on the storage unit in the background.
Mom left the marriage with nothing but that storage unit and our clothes. She packed it up and drove back to Saint Louis. That storage unit followed us to every apartment, condo, and house.
When Mom grew bored and wanted new furniture, we would take apart the storage unit and re-configure it — move the drop-leaf desk from the center to the right side, then swap the side the drawers were on, etc.
Even if she had had fully-functioning arms she couldn’t reach the top of it to dust it, and dust bothered David’s asthma, so dusting the storage unit was always my job. Only, you couldn’t just dust it. Every inch had to be massaged with the Lemon Pledge. The oil, not the spray stuff, no, that would be too easy.
It felt like it took hours rubbing the oil over every inch of that thing. For a while I had a reprieve because I couldn’t get to the top; only Dad could reach the top. Then I grew tall enough and had to oil up the whole thing.
I got rid of Mom’s storage unit when she died.
The other night I was watching Better Things and I saw that the therapist played by Matthew Broderick has been applying Lemon Pledge to his storage unit for fifty years now. It was odd to see it there.
2 responses to “My Old Nemesis … We Meet Again”
Yep, even just *having* an item of furniture like that in every childhood home would burn it into your retinas, let alone having to give it a routine anti-dust massage with Lemon Pledge…
Unless he finds the routine soothing, however, the fictional therapist has probably subcontracted out the Lemon Pledge-ing of his storage unit.
(and is that a sugar-cube house also behind the adorable children? With Necco wafers for the roof???)
KC – it is indeed a sugar cube house. And that must have been our last winter in Texas be1f9re the divorce, because we never did a Necco wafer roof again, all the Saint Louis roofs were Hershey’s bars.