Monday, February 7, 2011

SPRAYED LIKE A ROACH

I'm at work right now. The doors are all shut  and the windows are locked up tight. The cleaners are here. One of them is spraying Lysol right underneath my chair as I type. I think it's Latin Lysol, bought from El Mercadito de Knightdale. No, I'm not racist. (keep in mind I used to live on the equator) These are friends of mine- Abran & Angelina who I have chatted with and admired since I met them about five months ago. But at this moment the harsh chemicals that they spray every other week are killing me slowly like an under-the-kitchen-cabinet roach who simply came out into the daylight for a Dorrito crumb and got blasted by a stream of Raid. Now they are mopping the tiled floor with some sort of solution made from bleach and ammonia, surely. Mr. Clean is raping my lungs something awful and now Angelina is shaking Dollar store Rug-So-Fresh a few feet away from me. I'm getting up. I'm staggering over to the back door that opens onto the screened porch. I fling it open for one last desperate breath. My friends forget I know Spanish:
"Why did she leave the door open?" Abran says as he wipes purple-scented Pine-Sol on the fridge doors.
"I dunno, she didn't say"  Angelina says, shaking the feather duster over my hair. Now at this point you're realizing I don't clean my house with chemicals. The main reason being that it kills brain cells and lowers the immune system, but also we live on well water and I don't want that going into the system. My mother-in-law, who is a cancer survivor, has also shared much research with me on the effects of chemicals building up in the body over time. I clean my home with not much more than what's pictured above. I have a squirt bottle in every room with plain white vinegar that kills just as many germs as Lysol wipes. For dirtier jobs like the toilets, I use a powder scrub or maybe a thick squirt liquid from Whole Foods. Happily, these products are well liked by other consumers too and have entered more mainstream markets such as Target and CVS. I'm  at the point now that the chemicals in this house are giving me a headache and making my teeth hurt. I think I'll  have to start bringing a gas-mask in to work.

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