#leaning

As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew. ↗

— Roz Chast

#cleaning #death #mourning #parents #perception

I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#along #cleaning #deciding #exam #failed

When I was a kid a growing up in Ontario, Canada, Lake Erie was so polluted, I never thought it would ever, EVER be turned around where they could start cleaning it out in my lifetime! ↗

— Rick Danko

#canada #cleaning #could #erie #ever

When I made my Broadway debut, I was still cleaning houses, something I'd done since I went out on my own at 15. ↗

— Aida Turturro

#cleaning #debut #done #houses #i

My mother came here to New York. She and my grandmother were domestics, cooking, cleaning for other people. ↗

— David Dinkins

#cleaning #cooking #grandmother #here #mother

I'm really good at laundry, and I have no problem cleaning the kitchen. ↗

— Denis Leary

#good #i #kitchen #laundry #no problem