Day 3: Vacuum

Immediately after getting married, I moved from Massachusetts, the place I'd called home for 21 years, to Georgia. I lived on a military base in the south western part of the state on the border with Alabama, miles away from Atlanta-- the only city that was even vaguely reminiscent of Boston. Our first night in our new home we slept on the hard white linoleum floor wrapped up in sleeping bags.  I cocooned myself in, hoping to prevent the roli polis and spiders that I'd seen crawling around from finding their way in.

I soon learned that bugs are an inexhaustible  presence in the South. Cockroaches sprinted across the floor, up the walls, under the couch. They fearlessly ran toward me, unphased by my attempts to thwart them with endless cans of Raid.  The Swiffer's sole purpose became the extermination of bugs. Spiders creeped over the sunken door jambs, brown recluses hid out in closets. In mid-summer grasshoppers found their way in through the dryer duct and taunted me by jumping feet from the floor as soon as I approached. In late summer roli polis came out of every crack in the base boards. Slow moving, tiny beetle-like bugs the size of carpenter ants, except round and fat, their only defense mechanism was to roll into a tight ball. Their life spans were short. I'd wake up in the morning and step out into the hallway to find dozens of them had dropped dead mid-stride over night. I'd clean them up daily with the vacuum pictured here.

We bought the smallest, cheapest vacuum we could find. It worked well for the first week before the small openings on the bottom became clogged with hair and bug carcasses. It slowly worked less and less, until eventually it just gave off heat and blew dust in my face as I pushed and pulled it mercilessly over the same spot on the carpet.

Determined to make it work, I pulled out a screwdriver and dissected it on the kitchen floor. I extracted endless mounds of hair and dust-- back then my hair reached to my waist and fell out everywhere. Despite the shopping bag of debris I'd discovered in this tiny vacuum, it still hardly worked when I turned it on again. Somehow, it suffered through the two years we lived in Georgia and even survived the move back to Massachusetts. We'd been back just a few months when I decided the scent of burning hair and the complete absence of suction meant it was time for a new vacuum. Despite the fact that it has been nearly four years since I replaced it, this "power stick" has been sitting in my front entryway, collecting dust since Hoover took over. I am thankful to have garnered the power to leave it with its memories on the curb.