Scrub scrub

Boy, it's so fun to, um, clean this here fence...boy howdy please pay me to clean my fence

May 25, 2025

6' Glenshire®™ Vinyl Privacy Fence | Weatherables

I am taking a breaking from cleaning to write this.

Growing up, some guys had grip strength machines, little springs you could squeeze. I never had one. Cut to like 30 years later; my fingers are exhausted from holding a sponge and scrubbing. Arms and back and the rest of me is doing okay, btu I can’t really pick up a sponger anymore. I can palm one and push real hard with my arms, as if I’ve been behanded, and that works, but it’s way more effort a whole-body effort, and all I’m trying to do is scrub something with a sponge.

It’s spring cleaning day, so my once yearly task of cleaning the fence is upon me. The new house had one of those two-yard-high white fences, gleaming white, Stormtrooper white, furniture-from-the-future white.

If you want a realization akin of Gulliver being disgusted my people’s skin when he shrinks down and sees people’s pores and stuff up close, go stand right next to one of those hollow white fences. They’re shellacked in all sorts of nastiness. The bottoms get bounceback spatter of dirt every time it rains. Green fungal growth seeps. Some black spots simply won’t scrub off: it’s like they’re scars, like someone was welding net to the fence. And I find bizarre trilobite tracks meanderings horizontally through this gunk. Is that slugs, snails?

Our fence has a long bit next to trees; these are especially filthy. I am going to put 100% of the blame of this on squirrels. Squirrels love these trees, and squirrels are basically Pigpen from Peanuts in terms of being mobile dust clouds. They love the trees, and each time they run up or down one the fence gets a little spray of dirt. Over a year, that every-few-minutes dusting thickens up until it looks like home plate after a double-header.

Because I think of everything as relating to writing and editing, I thought of cleaning the fence as like editing. You now what you have to do, but each task has all these ancillary tasks. The long stripes of fencing needed to be scrubbed with the scrubber side of the Scrub Mommy, and then squeegeed off with the sponge side of the Scrub Mommy. But there were perpendicular stripes of plastic running on the top and bottom, and a decorative extra stripe on top, and a textured plastic latticework that seemed resistant to scrubbing but wiped shockingly clean when I used the sponge side.

(The Scrub Mommy is identical to the Scrub Daddy save for a bow in her hair. That’s extra scrubbing material, so bonus. Is it retrograde or progressive that the Scrub Daddy has a spinoff that’s a bit better than the Scrub Daddy?)

(And in Googling the images I found out my make of fence is called a Glenshire.)

I kept finding other tasks a bit related to fence scrubbing – collecting sticks by the base of the fence, pulling dead branches that touched the top, unfolding more of those brown paper yard bags to house all the sticks and dead branches, refilling the dirty water every few minutes. And other tasks not related to fence scrubbing: I don’t know about your deck, but my entire deck is made of surfaces. And each surface would probably look better if scrubbed free of dirt.

So instead of diligently doing one thing until I was done, I started to do a little bit of everything. No task for more than five or ten minutes than onto the next, leaving the previous task a quarter-done. I felt like a productive bee, but the sort of bee who leaves the vast majority of the flowers in a garden unvisited.

This is often how I’ll edit a project. Read a few paragraphs, then run a global check for double spacing, read a few more paragraphs, remove a pun from two chapters before, replace it with a worse pun, delete that, read three more paragraphs, realize I’ve stumbled across a sentence I need to delete immediately, read a few more, then write two sentence in a whole different project. It all gets done, but the way it gets done is probably nonoptimal.

Eventually I settled down and decided to clean a task. The fence got completely scrubbed and sponged: good for another year. The bit of driveway in the backyard was sept of whatever organic debris accumulates there; it no longer crunches when I walk across it. I found some of the various surfaces of the deck, and I scrubbed and sponged them. That was a mistake, since it made a clean spot. Shoot: now I’ve got to do that for all the surfaces.

And then my fingers failed me. They’re recuperating right now: I can type since that’s not a strenuous activity for them. This is a real upside to the flitting-about tactic for getting a lot of different projects done at once, I don’t have ADHD (gulp, I don’t think) but I have to think this is a great way to work for those who do have it. And the exhaustion from doing one repetitive task over and over is elided because you never stay on one task for too long.

The fingers are feeling good enough for me to go and take another whack at scrubbing.

One great/frustrating thing about cleaning: it reveals dirty patches you may not have ever seen. The rug covered with dirty clothes doesn’t look like it needs a vacuum until all the old socks are off of it. The bedlinens only look like they need a washing once they’re made on the bed. Only after you empty the sink can you tell the counters need scrubbing.

Same with editing: once the typos and TKs and sentence fragments are fixed, once the piece actually reds like a proper piece, only then can you actually figure out what it’s trying to say. And how many sentences are doing the proper work. Which can be cut, which need to be bolstered, which are great but belong in a different essay, which are awful but necessary so they’ll be rewritten.