Cleaning Doorways
It has been a while since I have commented on a quirky aspect of Maltese culture. So today I will focus on women cleaning their doorways.
Every day I notice Maltese women (usually on the older end) busily scrubbing away at their front doors. Then they will mop and sweep the pavement outside the door. They do this with the intensity of an antique collector polishing away at silver. I notice this a lot in my neighbourhood, because there are still many houses left which have not yet been torn down to make blocks of flats. Well we have those too, including where I live, but at least there is still a balance in this area.
Now, I am always a bit puzzled by this practice. I am a very clean person, and I do make an effort to keep the *inside* of my home clean. I can be a bit messy, but never dirty. I find it only natural to keep one’s home clean. But it had never occurred to me to aggressively wipe down the *outside* of my home. In fact, outside of Malta I do not think I have ever seen anyone washing his or her front door. Outside doors and walls do not seem to me to be things that need cleaning. They just sort of exist, and sometimes get rained on.
And as for the pavement, well I suppose that is a bit more reasonable. Though the instant they finish, hundreds of people will walk right on it. Again, public streets are not something I ever thought of expending my energy on cleaning and scrubbing. And I do wonder how environmentally conscious it is to be spreading all those cleaning materials on the road. Do they leak into the ground? Do they pollute the little vegetation around? Does anyone here care?
I must admit Grego it is a practise that has always fascinated me, one of the many quirky practises that occur on these Islands, and yet at the same time seems to add to my fasination for Malta & Gozo.
Don’t you just love it!!
It is the dust factor that summons hundreds of Maltese to wipe the front door. The Maltese limestone itself sheds its fine powder like icing sugar on the panelled doors, provoking house-wives’ (or househusbands’) ire. I can still hear my mother moaning about these islands’ curse!! I must admit to having taken this habit with me to the UK. I still polish our front door or instruct the cleaner to do just that. How suburban is that?!