As many of you know, I’m recovering from a head cold. Recovering being the term to use when you need to learn to breathe again usually one clear nostril at a time. Then there’s the matter of sounding and wheezing like a ninety-year old man who chain smoked all his life.

Recovery always takes longer than the actual illness.

And despite the fatigue dogging my steps, I have a pathological need to erase this virus from my house.

Some might say this is natural. Sickness has an odor—whether we smell it with our noses or our brains. And I want it gone. Perfectly natural to kill the thing that made me so miserable.

Or maybe the problem goes deeper than that.

When I was younger and stayed home from school on account of not feeling well, my mother often had me scrub the house. Sweating the sickness out of me, I believe it was called.

It worked.

And no, it never stopped me from taking the occasional “cough, cough, wink, wink” sick day. So now I’m staring at the walls thinking, I could probably wipe them down with bleach and wash all the curtains and kill every bug in sight.

Is it just me? Or does anyone else have a need to spring clean at the end of an illness?