My baby brother, Timmy, is a spirited little boy. He seems to never run out of steam (like the energizer bunny), and he’s always running here and there making some kind mess. He plays with the dirt in the flowerpots and tosses it onto the living room rug. He digs in the cat’s litter box and spills it all over the kitchen floor. He’s even been known to fling his mash potatoes at the refrigerator door just to see if they might stick—they do! But by far his favorite thing to do is to put his dirty palm prints on the freshly cleaned windows. He arranges them in patterns, like an artist—I’ve watched him. And when he’s through he calls for my mother so that she might admire his work. Not surprisingly, this causes her to nearly lose her mind. To deal with it, she simply shakes her head, bites her lower lip, and sends him to his room. Then she rushes to the kitchen to get one of her many streak free window cleaners from Fuller Brush and washes the windows anew. She stands there for a moment and admires them, perhaps because she knows they won’t remain that way, in that pristine sparking state for very long.

I feel for my mother, really I do…if I had to do the same thing over and over again without results. Well, it’s like this Greek king called Sisyphus, who had to keep on pushing this enormous boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down on him again. Not that my mother hasn’t tried to talk to my brother. Before she lets him out of his room, she always sits him down and tells him to stay away from her windows. He says he will, with that sneaky, mischievous smile of his, then runs off to do it all over again. Thank goodness my mother has those streak free window cleaners from Fuller Brush. It only takes her a moment with a couple of paper towels to return the windows to their prior glory.

These days she has a bottle of those streak free window cleaners from Fuller Brush practically glued to her hands and she’s always rushing off to clean the windows my little brother ruins with his dirty palm prints. I sometimes wonder why adults are such neat freaks. If I had dirty windows, I wouldn’t keep on cleaning them; I just leave them dirty and tell all my guests my little brother is a pig.