I grew up in the same apartment building my mom and uncle did, one floor above where my maternal grandparents lived. It is a neighborhood called Woodlawn in the Bronx which borders Yonkers and which may as well be in the heart of Ireland. More on that later.
My grandparents lived in the same apartment for 60+ years. My grandfather, aside from working full-time as an architectural draftsman, was also responsible for cleaning this gigantic apartment due to my grandmother's heart condition.
Well, folks. Grandpa died in October 2010, and I am convinced that this gigantic apartment never had a proper cleaning since, oh, ten years ago.
I opened the door to the apartment and oh yeah, it smelled. I don't know what it smelled like, but it smelled. I quickly opened a few windows. I took everything in. In 60 years, my grandparents never bought new furniture. They did not own a microwave or a dishwasher. They had no upgrades to the shelves, countertops or anything in all the years of living in this apartment. So, walking in there would be a big time warp to most folks who hadn't grown up there.
I continued my walk around the apartment in the lessening stages of shock & awe. Let's say, I was in the advanced stage of "eew, how did anyone let my grandmother live in here by herself" and the beginning stage of:
Cleaning fairy, answer my prayers. Before I could even THINK of laying my head down in a bed in this apartment, I wanted to fumigate it. It wasn't funny, it was a health risk. Through the years of my grandfather being sick, my grandmother never allowed any strangers into the apartment, including professional cleaners. My grandmother could not see due to macular degeneration therefore her version of clean was a lot different from my version of clean.
I became Cinder-Jana. I spent $200 on cleaning supplies at National Wholesale Liquidators while fending off busybody neighbors. Some had known me from my time living in the building, others only knew my grandmother. Some were just gossips who had nothing else better to do than talk. People wanted to know what was going on with the apartment. OK. I AM CLEANING IT.
I took to dumping garbage at night. Recycling was also brought down at night. In a 2 or 3 week period, I got rid of 34 industrial size garbage bags containing either garbage or recycling. My cats were layered in a fine coat of dust that I have only now (after 71/2 weeks) managed to contain. My grandparents saved EVERYTHING, as in ALL OF THE STUFF. It was not a happy time for my mother. Hell, it was not a happy time for any of us. I cleaned out closets and stuff would fly out at me, be it empty Sweet N Low packets, loose change, jewelry, empty plastic bags (for which my grandmother had a crazy sort of infatuation with). In the two years my grandmother spent in the apartment alone, she kept "losing" things, for example, the keys to the apartment. In my working throughout the apartment, I have found a total of 38 sets of keys, all in different places, put there by my grandmother with the best of intentions. There were just things, and if I began cleaning one place, I would invariably end up in another room of the apartment trying to place the one thing where it belonged. My Uncle's old room had been used for storage since he moved out on his own, and in order to get stuff to come out of the room, I had to actually remove stuff from the room. It was almost like an episode of Hoarders, but not quite on that level.
I don't mind cleaning. I truly don't. But to walk into my grandparents' home of 60+ years after being on the road for three days to be greeted with an overabundance of steam, heat and dust was not an experience I would want anyone to have to live through. It was not a healthy nor livable environment for an 86 year old woman to have been living in, and I was thorough in making sure to turn it into just the opposite of that - livable, workable and fully functional.
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