Living Retired –‘Broom Brouhaha’
Living Retired — ‘Broom Brouhaha’
By Gary Chalk
This past week was typical. I misplaced my iPhone, the key fob for my Jeep, my glasses, the television remote, my wallet, even the grocery list that I swear I had in my hand two minutes ago! What was different though is this all happened on Wednesday. Before lunch.
It gets worse, way worse. I couldn’t find the broom we use to sweep the kitchen floor.
I can hear you now, “Come on Gary, how on earth can you lose a friggin’ broom?”
That is a good question. The simple answer, okay the only answer is, I don’t know.
There is the idiom ‘the new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom cleans all the corners.’ Since we misplaced our broom — and because Jan says I cook wall to wall — walking on our kitchen floor was, well, not pretty.
To make matters even worse, Jan has been complaining that I have become forgetful the past few years, so I was apprehensive to tell her I couldn’t find our broom. It is one thing to say you can’t find your iPhone, but another to have to admit to losing the broom. I hoped Jan would be the one who couldn’t find the broom, but no luck it was me.
“Jan, I have finished washing the dishes and I need to sweep the floor. I can’t find the kitchen broom.”
“Gary, I am busy right now. Did you look where we keep it in the laundry room?”
“I already checked there. You know the broom — it has a long red handle.”
“Gary, of course I know what our broom looks like. Don’t be a smart aleck!”
For the next few days our beloved broom baffled me. Try as I did, I could not scrape up any dirt on it. Jan tried to brush me off, “Gary, get over it and just go out and buy a new broom!”
“But Jan how can we lose a broom? It’s not as if the broom is the size of a pencil. Its big enough to trip over if you leave it laying around. It’s got to be right under our feet.” With that I was on a mission: to find our broom!
I looked again in the laundry room where we tuck the broom beside the beer fridge. Maybe it’s a guy thing but there is something about a broom and a Bud.
I looked further: no broom in the basement. Nor no broom in the bedroom.
For a couple of days when I wasn’t busting my backside searching for our broom, I was down on my hands and knees with a brush and dustpan cleaning the kitchen floor. I gathered enough bits of carrots, green onions, peppers, and celery in the dustpan to make a chopped salad!
“Jan, you know those bags of prepared salad we purchase? Well this week we don’t need one.”
They say the quickest way to find something you have lost is to go out and replace it, then by the time you return home what you replaced has shown up. That theory proved to be true when I lost my glasses. And it happened with the broom. I walked into the house and Jan said, ‘Look what I found. I opened the front door and there it was.”
It turns out the broom was leaning against the mailbox. How can that be? Was it there all along?
So now we have two kitchen brooms. If we ever lose one we will have a spare broom at the ready. I enjoy having two brooms: we can make twice as much mess and clean it up in half the time. A clean sweep.
Living Retired is written by humour columnist Gary Chalk.
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