Brief Broominations

I just swept my floor with my wonder broom. I am so impressed with my wonder broom that I thought you might enjoy seeing it. My wonder broom is the long one, given pride of place in the top spot on my plastic armchair. (I don’t store the brooms in my plastic armchair, although I could, because it turns out I almost never sit in my plastic armchair. I just posed them here for the photograph so you could see their size.)

I don’t actually know what the sweeping part of this broom is made of (the rest is aluminum and plastic, as you can probably tell). But this natural fiber, some sort of grass, is quite amazing. It is both soft and strong, it has a wide sweep-span, and it catches even the tiniest specks of grit. In the US I would call these specks dust, but here they are definitely grit — tiny but mighty! For some reason, there are many, many newly-arrived, tiny and not-so-tiny specks of grit on my floor each day. That makes it fun to sweep, of course. It wouldn’t be fun to sweep if your floor was spic and span, would it? Even if I don’t keep my windows open, the grit accumulates. Sometimes for extra fun I let my floor go for a couple of days!

The other broom, the coarse one, is one that I inherited from a previous occupant of this flat. I have never used it. I guess it is for larger-scale items than grit. I’ve seen people using this type of broom outdoors to sweep up garbage and leaves and such. Anyway, I thought I’d include it just to give a broader spectrum of broom types available here. (Post-script to this paragraph: The other day I discovered that the “other broom” is for cleaning toilets! I saw one on a commercial for toilet bowl cleaner. LOL and Gross! I had it on my plastic armchair! Oh well, I hardly ever sit in my plastic armchair anyway.)

One observation I would make about these brooms is that as you can see, both have short handles, which means that in order to use them, you have to stoop down. To me (as someone who has never shied away from over-analyzing things) this is because sweeping is women’s work. It seems that when jobs are primarily for women, the tools tend to be inconvenient or not very nice. To extend the example from tools to workspaces, kitchens here tend to be quite cramped, dark and generally unpleasant compared to other rooms in the house. Not only is a woman’s work never done, it is often not easily done. On the other hand, in a dark kitchen it is harder to see that the floor needs sweeping!