Clean Anything with Vinegar & Baking Soda
May 16, 2010, By Greg Hoard 0 comments
Every time a venture to the local grocery store leads me down aisle 14, a certain sense of remorse comes over me. This is the aisle where I have wasted so much money and so much time. This is the aisle that contains the memories of a misspent youth. This is the aisle that holds all the household cleansers: for windows, for counter tops, carpets, for pots and pans. This is where I dropped cash like I was feeding birds.
Ah, the horror of it all. If only I had met Gladys, dear graying Gladys, years ago.
We first met in aisle six. Aisle six is where the wine bottles are lined-up like legions of soldiers. She was selecting a Port. I was considering a cheap Pinot.
“My,” she said, with a twinkling smile and a nod toward the bottle in my hand, “aren’t we so modernly conventional?”
No doubt, a retired teacher or professor, I thought.
She was charming and disarming – 60-something – and for all those reasons, we struck up a conversation. She was, in fact, a retired high school English teacher, alone now, and living on a fixed income. As we talked, my eyes scanned the spare contents of her grocery cart. There was pasta and tuna fish, cat food and decaffeinated coffee, sausage and ginger ale. But tidily tucked into the corner of her cart were two large bottles of vinegar and big boxes of baking soda.
“That’s an awful lot of vinegar,” I said. “You must eat a lot of spinach and greens.”
She laughed. “Heavens, no,” she said. “It angers my digestive track. The vinegar and baking soda are cleaning products. Together, they do almost anything.”
“Anything?”
“Anything,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Everything,” she said, smiling, but with some impatience. “Go to the library. Look it up!”
This was 1981. Ronald Reagan was running for president, baseball split its season and Gladys changed my life. Since that serendipitous meeting and the subsequent trip to the library, I seldom spend a dime on anything from aisle 14 other than detergent and dish soap.
