First, housework is traditionally women’s work. Car repair, barbecuing and lawn-mowing are designated men’s work, while a woman is judged on the neatness of her home. This is true even if she and her husband both work full time and despite the advances of so-called women’s lib. Medieval words like slattern and streel for untidy or slovenly women also imply promiscuity. In the 1400s, a slut was simply a woman whose house was untidy.

Organization and orderliness don’t necessarily come naturally to all women, though. A friend told me she suffers from HADD, housework attention deficit disorder, and I can relate.

House-cleaning is said to be the best-paid hourly job in the Adirondacks for women, yet it remains just that — women’s work. There may be professional house cleaners who are men, but I’ve never heard of any.

Why not? I imagine a crew of detail-oriented fellows, experienced, strong and agile, equipped with excellent cleaning devices and products and a lot of bossy, la-di-da yet exacting, rigorous and stringent opinions. They can and will tell you about sanitation, stain prevention and removal for every surface, home and office decor, pet hair, vermin and furniture placement.

They show up in a spotless van emblazoned with the name of their company and tear through your home or office, doing a crackerjack job in record time and of course leaving a huge bill, as meticulously itemized as a hospital bill. Homeowners lucky enough to contract their services drop the name of the company at cocktail parties.

Or, on the other hand, a man house cleaner could just be some guy named Fred. Your neighbor, maybe.

Neither of these is likely to happen. House cleaners, whether professional or home-based, are generally women.

Kinds of housecleaning include: routine, project clean-up, preemptive (a military term defined as an attack against an enemy — here, disorder — in response to an obvious threat of attack), coerced (as to a child, “Go clean up your room!”), hostile, for hire, by proxy (when you hire a cleaner) and crisis (when your mother-in-law is coming to visit).

Housework is fundamentally an attempt at control, not just over the immediate household, but one’s life in general. If we can’t even keep the house clean, how are we to stave off the reaper?

“The Secret Life of Dust,” by Hannah Holmes, is a fascinating book I’ve mentioned before in this column. Holmes writes that we come from dust and will be dust again. Nowhere else have I seen science and the Old Testament come together so neatly.

Vacuuming and sweeping cause dust to rise up into the air, where humans breathe it in, Holmes writes. This validates my lifelong fear of vacuum cleaning. Still, when compelled to vacuum, I have done so, often practicing the slam method of hostile vacuuming used by housewives everywhere there are vacuum cleaners. Some may call it passive aggressive vacuuming.

By the way, I maintain that passive aggression has been given a bum rap. What are one’s choices in a situation in which one, normally so sweet, begins to feel–not to put too fine a point on it–a little upset?

Hostile vacuuming, with its loud noise, reckless ramming of walls and furniture, some of it quite possibly family heirlooms, and self-righteous implied attitude — “SOMEONE has to do the cleaning around here!” — comes in right next to slamming the cupboard doors.

Getting back to the book, Holmes tells us that the dust on our computer screen and beneath the bed is a conglomeration of disparate particles, including star dust from meteorites, desert sand from as far away as the continents of Asia and Africa, lint, bacteria, bits of our own sloughed off skin, dust mites and the tiny so-called pseudo-scorpions that stalk them.

Far from romanticizing a person’s aura — Holmes is a scientist, not a psychic — she writes that we all walk around surrounded by individual clouds of dead cells and moisture droplets.

In the last chapter she sanguinely reminds us, “Indeed, the entire Earth will be dust.”

All of this Earth dust, according to Holmes, may float around the universe until it gathers itself into other planets, just as our solar system was created. New life may begin.

The book ends on this note: “And then, like an old newspaper in the attic, the worn-out universe will gradually disappear under the thickening dust.”

Maybe so, but that is no excuse not to pick up your socks.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the Lake Placid News for more than 20 years.)