I stood at work holding a donated can of Scrubbing Bubbles, wanting it as bad as I'd want a warm brownie.
Scrubbing Bubbles is fantastic! I'd only discovered it last year when I moved into my new apartment where half a can had been left behind. Its soft white foam falls softly, gently––like fake snow in a Hallmark Christmas movie––and it twinkles away soap scum as if by magic.
It damn well should work great:
using Scrubbing Bubbles is like spraying napalm in your bathroom.*
It takes no prisoners. Its tiny bubbles score an F from the Environmental Working Group.
(At that link ^ you can search other household products, and more.)
I know that, and I WANTED IT ANYWAY.
It felt so good, so heavy, so effective in my hand, like a yellow Taser in a can.
The Prime Directive of all living things is to conserve energy, and bygod, Scrubbing Bubbles is Starfleet Command–approved in that category. You don't have to do anything but turn away.
I turned to Ass't Man, sorting electronics nearby, for help: "I know this stuff is bad. What cleaner do you use?"
"Dawn and vinegar."
And Helen, sorting clothes: "You don't even need the dish soap. Vinegar alone works great. And it's cheap."
At the Environmental Working Group site, vinegar gets an A.
I forced myself to put that warm brownie down. I didn't feel virtuous, I felt bereft and beleaguered.
I went home and scrubbed my bathroom with vinegar.
It does not sparkle.
I'm not kidding, you know. I had to MAKE myself not buy the Scrubbing Bubbles. I thought about that struggle to not-do the easy thing, the socially normal thing, when I read how Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings cleans her house in her memoir about living in Florida, Cross Creek.
Ms Moon got me interested in taking a closer look at Florida when she wrote a terrific post about her love for and her distress over her home state, Florida: "What Are We Doing Here?"
Also re Florida, elsewhere Ms Moon had mentioned M. K. Rawlings' The Yearling--and that's another book from my childhood that left an impression. It's in the category of books I'm not rereading though--books whose message about growing up is:
Either you or your pet have to go.
Old Yeller is another.
I know that is often the brutal reality of life, that we can't have what we want. (Put down that can of Scrubbing Bubbles.)
But in childhood literature, I prefer the message of Charlotte's Web: Reinvent reality! Write your way out of it!
We happened to have a copy of Cross Creek (1942) at the store though, so I picked it up. [Also, Finding Florida--pictured above. Has anyone read that? I will start it next.]
Cross Creek astonishes me. MKR's writing is as vivid as biting into an orange and as startling as seeing a snake. And, like To Kill a Mockingbird, it is not scoured of realities uncomfortable to the modern sensibility.
Since I am trying to understand, not to pass easy judgment,
this is useful.
For instance, so. . . how does Marjorie K Rawlings, a white woman, clean her house in the 1930s?
She buys a twelve-year-old Black girl. Literally.
Here's the opening of chapter 9 "Catching one young":
I bought Georgia of her father for five dollars. The surest way to keep a maid at the Creek, my new friends told me, was to take over a very young Negro girl and train her in my ways. She should be preferable without home ties so that she should become attached to me.
My friends traced a newly widowered father of a large family that he was unable to feed as a unit. He was happy to 'give' me Georgia, with no strings attached. A five-dollar-bill sealed the bargain."
Georgia is no Scrubbing Bubbles though--she does not give her all to making the house shine. MKR ends up paying the girl's father another five dollars "to take her back again".
MKR & ZNH
MKR became friends with another woman writer in Florida--Zora Neale Hurston, who was Black.
ZNH wrote a letter to MKR after reading Cross Creek praising it to the Moon. She even offered to come keep house for Marjorie KR after her maid Idella left (she'd finally found a "perfect" one):
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to Edith [Pope]
1943 Oct. 19. [Cross Creek?]
"Did I write you that Zora Neale Hurston wrote me of her distress and disgust at [MKR's maid] Idella's leaving, and knowing that I was trying to get to work on a book, offered--though she is working on a book of her own--to come and take over until I finished my book?
It is one of the biggest things I have ever known a human being to do. It made me ready to go-all for the Negro race."
––From the ZNH and MKR archive at the University of Florida.
Over and over I think, it is easy to judge people in the past for going along with social norms, but how will the future judge us for going along with the social norms of our time and place?
Won't the past hundred years of our snorting fossil fuels up our noses look evil & insane?
What do I risk in putting aside the social norm? Is it really such a price to pay, to clean my own bathtub? No, but I genuinely had to force myself not to buy those tiny bubbles.
Marjorie KR went along with the social norm of her time and place in buying a girl, and then she bucked it in befriending a woman. At first she is afraid a friendship with Zora Neale Hurston would hurt her husband's business, but later she declares she will pursue it even if it does.
It is simple from a distance, and it is complicated up close.
Reading, and writing, help me stand back and see.
Those tiny bubbles and my desire to do right are at cross purposes.
____________
* Re napalm. Wow. I did not know this till now, researching Scrubbing Bubbles further:
the product was originally called Dow Bathroom Cleaner, before it was sold to Johnson & Son.
From PBS: "Napalm and the Dow Chemical Co."
BELOW: Protesting Dow at the UW in Madison, where I grew up, in 1967--I would have been six. I remember many such student protests--we lived a couple miles from the U, and our grad student neighbors were very politically involved.
And I was right about the selling power of laziness--Scrubbing Bubbles' tagline is ––
"We work hard so you don't have to!"
