AP Features, April 30th, 2007
We were driving somewhere the other day when my husband put his foot on the accelerator and it refused to go down to the floor.
"What the heck is going on?" he said. "Oh my God, there's a ball under there!"
The ball then rolled under the brake pedal, and then under the seat. Fortunately he was going slow and we were in local traffic, so we managed to corral the darn thing before we had an accident. But it was obviously time for a task that is one of my most dreaded: Cleaning out the car.
This is a job of truly archaeological proportions. It involves digging through layers of stuff and knowing full well that the results may be downright frightening, not to mention quite unsanitary. I try to do it after a long trip, and then before a long trip, and I'll just say that the biggest difference is this: The food garbage is a whole lot fresher when you've just arrived home.
I probably should wear plastic disposable gloves when I go in there on a cleaning mission, but I'm just not that organized. My least favorite thing to touch is candy that has melted right out of its wrapper. I personally refuse to eat anything blue even when it's still nicely wrapped and in a solid state, but my children have no such inhibition, so I am constantly trying to figure out how to scrape off sticky stuff in rainbow colors that has melted and then re-solidified into the crevices of the car's side-door compartments. What's especially great is when it melts in the glove compartment on one of those documents that takes about 20 hours of wading through bureaucracies to replace, like the registration or insurance card.
Another favorite is when soda is left in the drink-holder in a disposable paper cup. The bottoms of those cups eventually dissolve, (just like your teeth do when submerged in an acidic sugary drink) and the mere quarter-cup of liquid that had been left in the cup somehow magically manages to soak the entire rug under the front seat.
Bottles aren't quite as bad; I've been known to get as much as a dollar's worth of refund money at 5 cents a pop in one good cleanup.
I also usually find a lot of items that had been missing from our kitchen, starting with the travel mugs (in case you were wondering, yes, a residue of milk and coffee is a great way to start your very own mold colony); various utensils, like a paring knife I brought along one day to peel apples for everyone on a trip, and a couple of crusty spoons. I'd packed those in the car oh, a month before, for an early morning ride that included the consumption of yogurt as a breakfast to go. PS, the empty yogurt containers were there too, right in the rear dashboard.
Reclamation of property assumed to have been lost is always a plus. A recent foray under the seats, in the cracks between the upholstery and elsewhere, turned up a missing baseball cap, a pair of yellow SpongeBob slippers, a pair of New Balance sneakers, several unmatched socks, two sets of nail clippers, the favor bag from a birthday party, and a book I'd started reading on our last trip that I was actually anxious to finish.
Before I could sit down to read, though, I had one more thing to do: Washing my hands with anti-bacterial soap.
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