Underfoot

Carpet accumulates many things. Dust, hair, dirt, pieces of intangible matter. My carpet in particular accumulates these things, except for the dirt. I don’t wear shoes in the house because of the filth I imagine they come in contact with the second they hit the pavement outside. Theoretically, I could have stepped in vomit or urine or who knows what else in a single pair of shoes. My carpet doesn’t need to accumulate those things. It already accumulates too many discarded bobby pins and miniscule scraps of paper.

There is an art to vacuuming carpet. My mother, a woman who spends much of her time cleaning due to her mild obsession with cleanliness, has perfected the craft of a well- vacuumed carpet and area rug. I, on the other hand, am merely a vacuum-e in training. The carpet in my room has unfortunately fallen victim to abuse via vacuum. I can never quite get the pattern right, the pattern of a tidy carpet. My mother can probably do a room one time over, while I spend too much time dragging the vacuum back and forth, over an over, trying to get the tracks to look neat. Several minutes of my life, maybe hours by now, have fallen to the floor and been sucked up by the vacuum.

I am in a chair-less hallway with nowhere to sit but the floor. There is scratchy carpet upon this particular hallway floor, poking me in places that I would rather not be poked. No matter how economical, practical, and/or cheap it was to install this carpet, I’m sure who ever chose it never sat on it to test it. How inconsiderate of them in a chair-less hallway.

An old friend of mine recently told me of the transformative Saturday mornings of her youth. She would sink to the floor while watching Saturday morning cartoons in an effort to blend in with the carpet. This was to prevent her mother from seeing her, therefore unable to tell her to turn off the cartoons.

Before my older brother moved to the mountains in Colorado, he was the owner of a precious batch of Sea Monkeys, a gift from a former girlfriend. He kept them on the short bookshelf in front of the large window in his room. One particular breezy summer day, the wind whipped his curtain into the little plastic tank, tipping it over. I will never forget the sight of the little instant pet crustaceans writhing about on the blue carpet of my brother’s room as we scrambled to save them. Nor will I forget the smell.

The ones we did save didn’t last much longer. Sea Monkeys could apparently survive a trip to space with astronaut John Glenn aboard the Discovery in 1998 but they could not survive a freak accident involving a curtain and blue carpet circa 2009.

Growing up, my mom drove my brother, sister, and I around in a navy blue 1994 Chevy Suburban. I remember the windows being rolled down in the summer while my mom blasted a heavy rock station from Chicago through the radio. We were never allowed to eat in The Suburban, but if we did, we made sure to pick up ever last little crumb out of the velvety soft upholstery. Sometimes I used to purposely bring my blanket in The Suburban and leave it on the seat next to me so the smell of the upholstery would absorb into my blanket’s fibers. Later, outside of the car, the smell would fade but not after I had inhaled them by holding the blanket close to my face. 

Snow blankets things but not nearly as much as it unveils. When it snows, the past lingers. You see the tracks of someone who jaywalked across the street. You see the tracks of a solitary animal that cut through a cornfield. There are tracks of a snowmobile in places you’d never think you should drive a snowmobile. There are tracks on top of a frozen lake, which will be impossible to recreate in about a month when the footprints disintegrate with the ice.

There are tracks in the carpet that prove someone has been sneaking around where they shouldn’t have. There was a track left on the living room carpet Easter morning that my eight-year-old self was convinced was the Easter Bunny’s. Tracks show us what we want to see, and sometimes what we don’t.

My mom would get the carpets cleaned every other year or so when we were kids. She’d call up “Barry the Carpet Guy,” which is exactly what we called him. I don’t remember much about Barry the Carpet Guy except for that he was tall, had a substantial nose and stomach, balding gray hair, and drove an old Dodge van with a loud exhaust. We’d watch him unload his huge carpet cleaner and attachments out of the Dodge, then we’d sit on top of the furniture as he sprayed the carpets with cleaner and buff them with his loud carpet buffer machine. We just sit there, on top of the couch or something and watch the large white pad of the machine rotate around and around in circular motions on the floor. When he was finished, Barry the Carpet Guy would gruffly tell us to stay off the carpets until they were dried. We respected his orders because his profession mesmerized us and because we thought he was a slightly creepy.

Once, when I was ten, my brother dragged me all the way down the flight of carpeted stairs in our house. I’m not quite sure how I found myself being pulled backwards down the stairs on my stomach in my Little Mermaid nightgown, but I remember it was supposed to be fun. My brother was laughing as he rolled me onto my back at the bottom of the stairs but I was crying. He’d pulled me too fast down the stairs and I’d gotten a rug burn on top of my right hipbone where my nightgown had rolled up. My skin had peeled off and blood began to prickle on the exposed raw skin. It took months for it to heal after it scabbed over. I don’t think I ever wore that Little Mermaid nightgown ever again. My brother still dragged me across carpets, though maybe not as vigorously.

Carpet can probably never truly be cleaned, yet there’s some unconscious trust we have in carpeting. Even though we know a carpet is probably loaded with shoe germs, cracker crumbs, and hair that isn’t ours, we still lay down on it. We forgive it because all it ever wanted to do was to relieve our feet from otherwise solid ground.  Carpet is considerate like that.

We also know that if we sift through the discarded bobby pins, tiny shards of paper, pieces of fuzz and hair, and the layers of unseen dust, we will find something else amongst the carpet. Something we thought we might have vacuumed up a long time ago.