I’d been thinking about it for roughly three years, ever since Mother began to lose her physical ability to keep up with her ambitions. Tackling it would represent both a response to a constant reproach and discarding a memento of a wonderful and quirky person now utterly lost. Besides, it looked like a stinker of a job. Procrastination seemed the best approach.

If Mother and I ever did anything the same way, I don’t know what it was. Our bathrooms always had both a tub and a shower. My truck was perpetually cleared for action, kind of an extension of my ego; I called her car “the mobile dumpster,” and for her it was purely for conveyance and storage. We even squeezed toothpaste tubes differently; so each of us had his own. This is currently causing a few tearful moments of regret as I use up the last of hers. “This was her toothpaste! I can tell!” It recalls a vision of her one day years ago at a Renoir show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She leaned forward against a restraining rope – exciting the attention of the guard – with her face only a few inches from “Dance at Bougival,” tears streaming freely, and whispered, “He touched this! He touched it!”

Her business had been kitchen design, so when we built this place about a dozen years ago, she got the best appliances we could afford. I like ‘em all, especially the refrigerator, a roomy black thing with its freezer in a large pull-out drawer on the bottom, nearly at floor level. I like that, too. It has an ice-maker that’s really handy, but usually turned off (I use so little ice, even in summer, that by the time I finish a batch, the cubes have ablated into peanut-sized chunks), and deep wire mesh drawers with dividers.

But there’s a fly in this ointment – what the Mexicans I worked with in Texas a long time ago called “una mosca en la sopa” – and it’s the wire mesh drawers. Small items and wet gunk can drop or drip down onto the white ceramic floor beneath, and there’s nothing – nothing! – that’ll even get near it without a major evisceration of the cabinet. There was even a small wooden clothespin, used, no doubt, in the dim past to seal a plastic bag, that I couldn’t get at, even with my vocational rehab long-range grabber. The freezer drawers had got to be unloaded and come out.

It took a while to decide whether the aseptic (because frozen) mess down there was a priceless memory of Mother – “She touched that!” – or a constant reproach to my housekeeping. Reproach finally won out. I emptied out the drawers, and found a bag of packages of pie crust and something called fillo dough, whose expiration dates reminded me of Bob and Ray’s commercial for “several hundred cases of bully beef, each clearly stamped ‘San Juan Hill, 1898.’” Regretfully, I trashed ‘em. I gathered every tool I was likely to need – getting up from down isn’t the gazellelike move it used to be – and went at it.

Both drawers probably come out, but I couldn’t figure out the upper one, so left it. On my hands and knees – prosthetic knees on a tile floor are quite painful, but I didn’t feel like running down to the shop for my pads, so I suffered – and sprayed the floor and sides with something called Ka-Boom! With a stainless steel flipper, I scraped the bulk of the fossilized stuff off the floor and started scrubbing with a plastic mesh pad. It worked fine, but even as far down as I could lower, I couldn’t reach the back. Managed to get up, tottered to the sink, got Mrs. Libman’s long-handled pot scrubber, put the mesh thingie over its bristles, and kept at it till every vestige of past carelessness was gone. Wiped it with a dishrag soaked in germ-killing dish detergent and dried it with a handful of paper towels.

All this time, in spite of some rather strong dissuasion, Kiki kept dropping her hedgehog ball between my knees on the floor to be tossed down the hall. But, done at last, I pulled myself upright by grabbing the countertop beside me, put the shelf, ice box, and frozen food back in, and shut ‘er down. Kiki had spotted two desiccated frozen peas on the floor, and grabbed them. I pried them from her jaws, turned toward the compostable stuff container, tried to pat myself on the back, and dropped the peas. This time, with another rude word or two, I let her have them.

I cleaned up saucepan, dishrag, flipper, mesh, and Mrs. Libman, and thought to myself, “This housekeeping gig isn’t as bad as it’s often advertised.” Then, as I tried to walk, my knees begged fervently to differ. Nevertheless, a long-deferred necessary job was done, and I had a clothespin to show for it, too. Like Scrooge after spurning the efforts of the gentlemen in his office seeking donations for the poor, I returned to my labors (in this case, a crossword puzzle) with a much improved opinion of myself.