Days Like This: Tar and Bleach Edition

Although this happened last spring, I decided to post it today, for my friend Jen, who will understand.

My husband is obsessed with our driveway. Twice a year he gets it sealed. I wonder if his zeal for driveway maintenance would be diminished at all if he had to seal it himself, but since there are apparently dozens of companies and individuals that want to do it for us, that is something I will probably never discover. As it is, it’s a minor inconvenience, in that the things in the garage are trapped in the garage for a day, and a rather minor expense. I have mentioned before that maybe we are being excessive and left it at that. I have enough other things on which to spend my petty irritation.

Monday was driveway sealing day, and since we had an early gymnastics class, I didn’t even have to worry about someone ringing the doorbell and reminding me to move my car, causing me to go out in my pajamas and crazy non-showered hair. When we arrived home from gymnastics, the driveway people must have just left. The driveway was glistening with a thick layer of perfectly even new tar. (Note: I’m not sure if what they seal driveways with is true tar, but for the sake of convenience, let’s call it that .) The driveway had been nicely roped off with florescent string and a sign. We parked in the street and walked up through the lawn to the front door. We stopped to smell the crab-apple blossoms, which were just peaking and about to scatter about the lawn in a shower of hot-pink, but all we could smell was tar. Lovely. I had to go to the bathroom, and my hands were full, so I unlocked the front door and went in, calling to Gretchen to follow.

I made it as far as the kitchen when I heard screaming. It was more of a fury scream than a pain scream, so although I turned and headed for the door, I was not filled with panic, and I was not running, and I yelled to Gretchen, “What’s the problem?” When she only continued to scream, I yelled a little more irritably, “Gretchen! What is the problem?”

You surely see where this is going. The problem, of course, was that Gretchen was covered with tar. For reasons known only to Gretchen and her omniscient God, and perhaps only one of those two, as soon as I had gone in the front door, Gretchen had gone over to the driveway. She didn’t get very far on its newly slimed surface before she slipped, skidded, and fell. Her brand-new white gym shoes were black. Her legs (thank goodness she was wearing a little leotard and no pants) were black, her hands were black, large portions of her pink coat were black, and even her face was smudged with tar. I know the rare child who really doesn’t care whether or not they are naughty or filthy or any manner of annoying or disgusting, but, thankfully, Gretchen is not one of them. She is perhaps exuberant and curious and opinionated and independent, but she doesn’t look for trouble most of the time. Somehow, it finds her. And so she was standing there surveying her hands and legs and shoes and screaming.

I’m sorry to say that when I surveyed her, scream is what I did too. Not the wordless shrieking issuing from my child but repetitions of “Why did you do that?” and “Don’t touch anything! Don’t touch anything!!” in escalating octaves. Oh, who am I kidding? There may have been some wordless screams of anger and frustration in there too. What a colossal mess. I’m surprised no one came out to investigate our mingled screams. I’m surprised we still have a rabbit infestation.

I went back into the house for a canister of wipes and managed to get most of the tar off of her hands and legs—enough, at least, to get her jacket and shoes off of her without spreading more tar. I had a little on the top of my shoe, and that was the only further casualty. She was still crying, and I was still telling her that her brand new shoes and her pretty pink jacket were probably ruined and she would have to wear them around with black on them and why would she do that? Then I took pity. She was sobbing and sobbing, tears running down her tarred face. To be fair, I could not remember specifically telling her to stay away from the driveway. I put in her the bathtub and scrubbed the rest of the tar off of her. Then I washed the tar out of the bathtub and put her in dry clothes and hugged and cuddled her until she calmed down.

Then I started in on the shoes and jacket. Lucky for us, very little tar had gotten on her leotard, and the part that had been tarred was already black. Small mercies. The shoes came pretty clean. The leather tops are more or less back to white. The fabric around the ankle openings is down to gray. The rubber around the bottom has been changed to more of a fluorescent green, but in all, they are not a complete loss. She is going to wear them the rest of the summer at any rate. Honestly, how long were they going to stay pristine anyway? They’re play shoes. Not play in the tar shoes, exactly, but if it wasn’t tar it was going to be sand or infield dirt or plain ol’ mud. The jacket was a larger project. I scrubbed with water. I scrubbed with soap. I called my mom, who, amazingly, did not know how to get tar out of fabric. We googled. I facebooked. I tried Goo Gone, which, for some reason, I had a bottle of in the basement. I got the black tar look down to a dark-grey very dirty look and left it to soak. Most facebook suggestions ended with some version of give up and get a new one.

While the jacket was soaking, I decided to continue on with the laundry in process. I transferred the dark load to the drier and put the white load in the washer. I added a bit of Clorox Ultimate Care bleach. I must not have put the bleach jug all the way back on the shelf because a few minutes later, when I was back to working on the tarred jacket, the bleach jug launched itself off the shelf and wedged itself behind the washing machine. I reached down to get it, but my arms are too short. I tried to reach it from under the set tub, which meant kneeling in a puddle of water from the drippy jacket, and found that my swimming shoulders are almost too broad to get between the sink legs. Feeling like I had done quite enough annoying household labor for one day (I had spent all of the pre-gymnastics morning fruitlessly trying to scrub and bleach the mildew stains out of my shower,) I went over to our family calendar and wrote “get bleach” in Doug’s color. I scrub showers, clean tar, and do the laundry. He can unwedge the darn jug of bleach.

I came out of the laundry room to ask Gretchen what she wanted for lunch and was assaulted by the sound of preschoolers singing “Saturday! Saturday!” in their shrill almost-off-key voices. The cabinets were practically rattling. Gretchen had just been given her new big-girl mattress and a CD player for her nightstand, and she was relaxing from the stressful tar-filled morning in her room. I did not find the din relaxing. So I shouted up the stairs for her to turn the music down. I shouted again. I screamed. The music was certainly too loud for her to hear me, so I stormed up the stairs and yelled into her room. She just looked at me with a scared and startled expression. Her eyes filled with tears. Suddenly, I felt like the worst mother on the planet. It was a jacket and shoes and a little noise, and what are those things in comparison to my beautiful, loving and joyful daughter? I turned the music down for her and hugged her for a long time and told her I would make her lunch and read her a story. It had been a long morning for both of us.

Just as lunch was almost ready, the alarm in the laundry room alerted me that I could shift the laundry again. I went into the laundry room to find a large puddle seeping out from under the washing machine. I had left a towel under the sink to catch the drips from the jacket, so I was confused. Crap. Don’t tell me, I thought, that the washing machine is leaking. Of all the days!!! But when I bent down to examine it, I noticed that it was not just water. It was thicker. Slimier. Smellier….

The cap on the jug of bleach had shattered in the fall, and of course the jug was not upright but on its side. Without a cap. And so a huge puddle of bleach had formed under the washing machine and drier, along the baseboard, and was spilling out into the main traffic area of the laundry room. Seriously. But it was lunchtime, and I have never needed a lunchtime quite so badly. So I closed the door on the laundry room and resolved that when my guests arrived, I would just say, yes, yes, my home does smell of tar and bleach. Long story.

When my covenant group arrived an hour later, they miraculously showed up with apple slices and brownies. More importantly, they helped me laugh about the whole day. It’s just stuff. It’s just one day. And it’s worth it, somehow. If this is the holy work to which I am called, then may God forgive me for having screamed in the midst of it.

And thank God for that returned sense of humor. I spent most of my morning cleaning tar and most of my afternoon cleaning up bleach. When my husband came home, asked about the “get bleach” on the calendar, and heard the whole saga, he asked, “Is the driveway OK?” He was serious. And yes, in case you are concerned, the driveway is going to make it.