La Giulia

I love my flatmate Giulia. She is one of the most generous, sweet, gentle people I’ve ever met. However, when it comes to matters of household cleaning, she terrifies me a little.

Lauren tells a story in which I’d used a bowl to beat some eggs, cleaned it, and left it to dry on the dishrack. Giulia, the next day confronted me with it, “Can you smell this ?!”. I honestly couldn’t, nor was there any evidence of use left on the bowl. You don’t have to know me very well to know that in matters of the kitchen, I don’t mess around. My clean dishes are clean.

“This bowl stinks (puzza) of eggs.” She insists. “Mi dà fastìdio il puzzo d’uova.” I can’t stand the stench of eggs. Dare fastìdio is one of my favorite expressions, because it for an Anglophone it suggests the irrationality of the repulsion – Giulia is fastidious – though Italians use it neutrally to express dislike, not to illustrate a quality of the disliker.

I took my scolding, offered to clean the bowl again and promised to be more careful next time, though, I don’t think I’ve made eggs again in this household.

The episode is exemplary of the huge gap between my understanding of a clean home and Giulia’s. Her morning routine involves care of the balcony garden, sweeping and dusting the entire house, and sponging down the bathroom and kitchen every day before she sits down to work. In New York, by contrast, I have a couple of cacti I water ever two weeks and I run the vacuum with about the same frequency. In the bathroom and kitchen I am more fastidious but they by so means get daily attention. The invention of the Swiffer duster has changed my life: now my apartment is dusted about weekly.

Another Giulia moment occurred just last week: “Laura, I keep finding your hair everywhere.” Ok. I’ve been shedding more hair than usual, and with a recent haircut, little pieces that got trapped in the thicket on my head are still just escaping. But what did she want me to do about it? She asked that I clean up the hair I’ve lost on the floor when I leave the bathroom. This is reasonable – but the problem arose in the first place not because I’m carelessly messy, but because I didn’t see the same mess she saw. A stray hair or two simply passed below radar for me. What next? “Laura, you’re shedding too many squamous cells?”

So I try to accommodate Giulia’s standards of cleanliness and she puts up with my slovenliness. If I become a better housekeeper for it, then all the better. But if I ever get to the point of ironing my underwear, please intervene.

postscript: Giulia and I are living very happily just the two of us. We do our own things, meeting occaisionally in the kitchen or to show off new purchases. I'm tidy, she's warm and understanding - I think the stress of extra people in the house was too much for us all.