Let me explain. It started in 2020 I think, five dark years ago, when we all found ourselves beset by the dragon touch of COVID.

At the time, She and I were about to hire a cleaning lady. I was never a pro, even though I had been cleaning my own three-room apartments in Manhattan for years when I first invited her to dinner. She looked around, sniffed and smiled, and ran her fingers over my furniture. Yes, like that.

When we became lovers and friends, She invited me to live with her. Yes. Snap your fingers. My life changed like that.

Cut to Waterville 2020, when COVID’s breath grew stronger. I wrote and cleaned, cooked, did the laundry, and kept washing bags of food. This was when smiling folks in the grocery stores began to look more like hooded Transylvanians who carried the bubonic plague in their hair. I became the new house cleaner, prepared to survive what seemed to us to be the Black Plague of 1350.

Cut to 2023, when all seemed to abate, and we stopped washing even the toilet paper, took deep breaths and considered hiring anew, and came up with blanks. Then, out of the blue, Joe, my faithful local barber of 38 years, came up with a miracle. “Our former cleaning girl might be available,” he said.

He introduced  us to Dina, who turned out to be a miracle. A just-this-side-of-middle-aged cleaning expert with a daughter and carpenter hubby. It was summer when this cleaning samurai appeared in shorts and a T-shirt, braids and fierce energy. She quickly became part of our family and a faithful friend.

This went on until April 2024, when I lost my Kay of 67 years, who became my constant spirit that still follows me around the house and sits by my bed at night and talks to me from the shadows to feed me advice and criticism. This spirit left me with the graceful help of Dina. So I survive and write, while mercifully twice a month here comes Dina, who also lives a packed life as an assistant cook at Winslow High School, keeping all those hungry kids fed and all cared for while she also cleans for two retired priests, a wonderful, loving 86-year-old mother, a 90-year-old father-in-law and a lawyer. I’m not making this up.

After she finishes putting my house in order and gets ready to go on to her busy life, we often share a laugh as we peek out the window at the passing walkers who stroll by and look up at the house. They seem to be whispering, “Look at poor old J.P., forced to hire a young blonde in black gym clothes getting out of her big, black truck to help the poor man wash his sheets.”

She, who always understood my dilemmas, stands back quietly and unseen by curious passing citizens as Dina bounces into the black truck, waves and wheels away. God bless the cleaning lady.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.