It's in our genes to clean

This photo documents the first time I used my push broom in my garage. Gotta admit, it does look a lot better swept.

I consider myself fastidious about cleanliness. Others might refer to it as an annoying compulsion  but however you look at, I figured it was a trait unique to me. After this morning, however, I am beginning to reconsider. I might have inherited "the need to clean gene" from my father.

I'll admit my desire to keep things tidy fades and then halts at the edge of my garage. If dried, rusted-red leaves collect in the corners and fine-grained silt sprays out in the middle of the room, I pay it no mind. I don't spend much time in my garage; it lies outside the boundaries of my house that hold my concern. If it gets dirty, so what? 

My father doesn't see it that way.  

When the very first group of dead leaves migrated into the garage, he asked when I was going to take care of this blight. One Christmas, he gave me a push broom for a present. 

So I shouldn't have been surprised when my father arrived this morning to fix a leak in my water heater, he also brought his shop vac to suck up all the various forms of dirt that have come to populate my garage. 

We moved the broken screen door, the cardboard box that has my artificial Christmas tree, and my outdoor tables and chairs to get any hidden debris. He directed me to clean up the dirt that settled in the concrete seams, expressed astonishment when I moved the trash can and saw all the muck that lived beneath it and even critiqued on my vacuuming methods. I learned you don't bend over, you extend the vacuum hose. I moved my car and my father changed the nozzle attachments to get the all the silt beneath it. He had mentioned in the past that it was as though I cultivated a beach in my garage. 

As I watched my father meticulously move the shop vac in straight lines to clean the garage floor, I smiled to myself. It is nice to know someone else shares my enthusiasm for cleanliness. No matter the obstacles, my father and I strive to remove any and all spots in a space. We can't help it. It is in our genes.