La Ilustre Fregona

I like to mop. I’m strange that way, I’ll admit it. Tidying is a grot and sweeping’s not much fun either, and scrubbing hurts. But mopping delivers a huge amount of satisfaction for the effort. You can make a good serpentine pattern on the floor, weaving the wet with the as-yet-unmopped dry. It’s a meditation, mopping.

The myth goes that the mop was invented in Spain. I’m going to guess that like so many other things it was actually invented in China and introduced through the Moors into the Iberian Peninsula, where it did undoubtedly undergo whatever modifications have led to its perfection somewhere before the time of Cervantes. (The kind of mop I’m talking about is the one that proliferates in Fantasia and that requires squeezing in a basket attached to the top of a bucket, not some miserable sponge-lever-effort that breaks after two uses. The Fantasia mop has survived for five centuries with no improvements necessary, though it doesn’t stop them from trying.)

Today I mopped up the leavings of last Wednesday’s windstorm, the traces of a week’s worth of cobwebs, the clumps of cat fur from the fierce play Diego and Charlie indulge in. The cats sit on the sofa arms watching me in a kind of horrified fascination. The floor glistens and then dries to its dull tile self, snug and ready for the next onslaught of walnut pieces, compost, smelly beetles, whatever else we track in from outside…