Yesterday I was confronted with a cruel reality: my vacuum had finally, after almost eight years, officially lost its sucking power. I tried cleaning the filters from dust and dog hair, which had always worked in the past, and tinkered with some other stuff but ultimately had to admit defeat; if I wanted clean floors and peace of mind, I'd have to suck it up (ha!) and buy a new vacuum.
As I began to re-coil the cord for the last time my mind began to review all of the apartments we've cleaned together, and all the emotional energy I've expended via my faithful Bissell. This vacuum was the first appliance I bought for my first apartment when I moved to Colorado for graduate school in 2006. It then supported me through five other apartments in Denver and one in Longmont before making the trek to Kansas; an appliance so critical to my daily operations that it was one of the only items I kept with me in the car instead of loading it onto the moving truck. Second only to Charlie, and two entities closely linked; one sucking up the hair that the other supplies by the billions.
Why do I hold my Bissell so dear one might ask? Cleaning has always been an extremely therapeutic activity for me. Often my friends would marvel at my OCD-level of cleanliness. It remained impossible to explain until one day when Chris and I had a particularly nasty fight about my inability to let him help me clean the apartment. It was then I realized that my obsession with cleaning was my way of dealing with emotional turbulence. As long as my environment was clean my mind could be calm. Most importantly, I was only one good vacuum session away from turning chaos into stability. Cleaning was the one serene activity maintained throughout a rocky childhood. No matter who I was with, father, mother, grandparents, aunts/uncles, etc, cleaning was always a routine and comforting activity that I took on with zeal; turning emotional turmoil into serenity with no more than the wave of a vacuum wand. We'd turn up the music and work laboriously until the place was immaculate, and we'd have the satisfaction of directly observing the fruits of our labor.
That being said, Bissie and I have been through a lot. Many a day I vacuumed away negative emotions, allowing the energy, and often tears, flow out of me as I fervently pushed the vacuum about; sometimes even slamming it into walls and whipping the cord around for an extra release. As the environment became clean, so did my mind and I could once again think clearly, rationally. Bissie was always there to let me push it around for my own comfort, alleviating me through changing environments and jobs, my oldest sister's death, the frustration of rapidly accumulating Corgi hair, the challenges of dieting and weight-loss, the fear of panic attacks, and worst of all, my first real heart break which unfortunately no amount of vacuuming would heal.
With this realization in mind I went to Wal-Mart to buy Bissell a replacement, and though I've been more emotionally stable since moving to Kansas then I can ever remember being in the past, I got a heavy-hitter; a Hoover prepared to contend with anything my emotional life throws at it. Shit, I may even be prepared to get my heart broken again. Another plus: it utilizes the best technology and equipment to rid my home of its copious amounts of dog hair!
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| The Hoover Emotion Sucker-Upper 2014! |
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