Small Things

LifeScapes 13 October 2024

Hello, friends—Here is the October LifeScapes post, celebrating living-in-place, wherever we are, however we are on this amazing planet. If you’re looking for my short pieces (fiction and non-), you’ll find them here, on the Short Reads tab. If you’re looking for my books, you’ll find them here. If you’d like to choose which posts you receive from me, you can always do that here.

I have a new broom.

I bought this one because it was cheap (the only broom under ten dollars on the catalog page), but also because its bristles are unflagged. That is, the bristle-ends are blunt-cut. This is an entirely new concept to me but it turns out to be really important when it comes to sweeping up the Molly-fur our senior puppy discards everywhere. I recently learned that my previous broom (for which I paid exactly twice as much) has flagged bristles with frayed ends, which is why they attach themselves so gaily to all that fuzzy Molly fur and will only let it go when I pull it off. My new, inexpensive unflagged broom, on the other hand, behaves the way a broom ought to behave. It does not cling to Molly’s castoff fur. Sweeping with it is an extraordinary pleasure.

Which makes me ask, with some exasperation, how I reached my advanced age without realizing that there is a difference between flagged and unflagged bristles. After all, I’ve been sweeping up after one disaster or another since I was old enough to take the broom my mother handed me, along with the implied instruction that this is what a woman does with her life.