1. “Once upon a time, there was a lazy mother living with her young children. Owing to laziness, she rarely cleaned the house, letting trash and empty bottles pile up and overflow from her house to the yard. A neighbor visited, gave her a pot of roses, and asked her to clean up the yard so the trash wouldn’t be all over the place. The lazy mother shrugged, defending that she was too busy with the kids and couldn’t clean. She then tossed that rose pot to a corner of the garden.
The next day, the rose pot grew into a giant thorny rose bush wrapping the entire house and prevented the mother from stepping outside. She was forced to live with her trash in her little house. Meanwhile, the children were free. They roamed everywhere, became skilled gardeners, hoping when the neighborhood was filled with flowers, the giant rose bush would finally set their mother free.”
2. “Another story, in a different city, is about a little girl who never cleaned up her toys after playing, which causes them much distress. One by one, her toys leave her, but their sadness remains, grows and spreads to other toys.
One day, when the little girl came home and found no toys left, she began to search. She looked everywhere, then crawled under the bed.
In shifting darkness, a swarm of black bugs burst out, engulfing the girl like a flood. They were shadows of her abandoned toys.”
3. “Finally, this is the story of a beautiful little girl who dearly loved a pink doll. Whatever she did: eating, sleeping, or playing, the doll was always with her. But just like in the song Puff, the Magic Dragon, one day the girl stopped playing with the doll. Her parents then put it in a chest as a keepsake.
Time passed, on one Christmas Eve, while sorting old knicks knacks to give away, the girl opened the chest.
Suddenly, the candlelit house plunged into darkness, music turned into weeping, snow outside became rain.
A few seconds later, candles relit and music returned, but the rain continued to fall. It was the lonely tears of the doll, who had cried all this time. The girl hugged her pink doll to comfort it and wrote this story down in her diary so she could later remind her own children never to forget a once-loved toy. From love one gains a soul. And with a soul, they need to be given to someone else to be played with.”
These are the three cleaning stories my daughter and I shared on an ordinary day, just like any other.