Whenever my cleaning lady crosses the threshold I feel sheepish about the state of my apartment, and worry that I'm her messiest client. But today she told me about an apartment she once cleaned in which the refrigerator was full of maggots, the walls were crawling with cockroaches, and the floors covered with thirty years of papers and dust. She ended up carrying forty bags of trash out of the place. But the worst was this: the woman who lived in this house of horrors said, "I think my cat is dead, but I don't know where it is. Probably somewhere under all those papers." And so it was.
And I was worried about a few dusty piles of junk mail!