Confessions of a Full-Figured Gal

Oscar and Felix

My sister just spent a month at our house.  We love one another dearly, but we were never made to live together, that's for sure.  The biggest problem is that she is Oscar Madison to my Felix Unger, the “Odd Couple”.  Maybe it all started when we were kids, and she used to give me a dollar to clean her room.  Whatever the reason, I'm sure I annoy her more with my picky ways than she annoys me with her sloppiness.  For example, she is offended if I clean the guest bathroom during her visit.  I just feel that a bathroom should be cleaned at least once a month.  Like, before the toothpaste in the sink turns into cement, making a mosaic with all the hair strands.

 However, this visit, I was determined that there would be no strife.  After all, she came to help me take care of my Dear One, who was coming home after a long hospital stay.  So I just let go of all expectations about my home, and resigned myself to making occasional guerilla raids on the guest bathroom, surreptitiously doing little bits of cleaning at a time, so my sister wouldn't notice.

 My sister, in her own home, has a self-cleaning oven and a garbage disposal in the sink.  I have a self-dirtying oven that has to be sprayed with toxic chemicals, and lest you think I'm too fastidious, let me tell you that I rarely do this more than twice a year.  I do have a garbage disposal.  It's called “empty the sink strainer into one of the plastic bags the newspaper comes in.”  Well, my sister set her own boundaries for her stay.  If we chose to be such losers as to live without a self-cleaning oven and garbage disposal, that was our problem, not hers.  Also, “I don't like to wash dishes,” she proclaimed (as if I didn't already know this).  So, every time I walked into the kitchen (2,000 times a day) there were dishes and food scraps in the sink. We won't mention the exploded sweet potato in the oven.

 Did I mention that my sister took over all the cooking during her visit?

 I don't mind cleaning up the sink, but then I had to listen to her complain about her teenage sons and the fact that they never clean up their dirty dishes, and that she has to walk around turning off lights after them, as I walk around turning off lights after her.

I have to say, I was very successful at not letting things bother me, expecially since my mind was occupied with the more serious issue of my Dear One's health.  I never made one single comment, snide or otherwise, and I know my sister was minding her p's and q's, too. One day, however, I walked into the living room to find my sister looking at a begonia with a magnifying glass.  I suspected she was not working on a botany project.  “Look at this.  I thought this was dirt, but this plant is infested with bugs.”  They were, in fact, dead bugs - I had sprayed the plant, but hadn't taken the time to wash it.  The memorable image of my sister, Oscar Madison, digging out a magnifying glass to examine dirt more closely, will bring a smile to my face for years to come.