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When I was a kid, we had a brown Hoover upright vacuum that was kept in the closet by the front door. I hated the noise, I hated hauling it up and down the stairs, and I hated the sticky release button on the handle. It would remain stubbornly, rigidly in place until it suddenly flopped over and landed on your foot. It left a bruise. Then my parents got a new one.

It was a Filter Queen. I didn’t know what that was, but my mother wanted a Filter Queen as much as I wanted a pogo stick — which was a lot. She already liked doing housework (a gene that hopped right over me) and now she was supercharged. She’d move that thing around the house, dragging it like an obstinate puppy on a string, expertly snapping in attachments because there was one for every need.

There was also one other coveted feature. It came with a hair dryer reverse switch thing. You didn’t have to go to the salon! I’d give my Mom a roller set, and she’d fire up the Filter Queen and sit there with a giant inflated pillow around her head as the machine wailed away seemingly forever. The sound was, well, like a loud vacuum. She’d do her crossword and if we wanted her attention we’d have to bellow over the noise. She’d turn it off, her head would deflate, we’d ask our question and then she’d fire it up again.

That vacuum had many applications I never understood which matters to this story because my mother bought me a Filter Queen.

As we moved out, my mother would buy us each one. Her friends would nod knowingly, certain we must be thrilled to receive such a fine appliance. There was no doubt they were great machines, and usually repairable when parts wore out. That, however, is the only thing I miss about moving on from my Filter Queen. It was heavy and unwieldy and took up a ton of closet space. Every time I used it, I felt like I was being chased by a small troll.

After many years, the attachments would no longer attach and the hose was compromised on both ends. I quietly replaced it, grateful to move on. And then I got to the cottage and found a Filter Queen. My Mom had replaced hers with a new one and taken the old one up north. My nemesis had returned, and Mom had conveniently brought up several packages of filters. She brought up more every time she came. I’d never seen so many filters.

To replace the filter, you had to release the arms on the tub part of the canister. You’d then be staring into an inverted cone. The muck was beneath the cone. It was gross. The problem with a cottage we all shared was that nobody knew who’d last changed the filter, and because it was a disgusting job, we’d just tell ourselves the last person had no doubt done it. The pile of extra filters rarely went down, not even after Mom died.

You tell yourself it’ll be mostly pine needles because that part of Ontario is a pine needle factory and pine is a good thing, right? It was not mostly pine needles, it was mostly mouse poop. It was also filled with a fine weird dust. It was like opening a tiny crematorium.

Ari brought up a great new vacuum last year, the kind where you can see what is being sucked up and then empty it immediately. I put the old Filter Queen out for bulk waste, and it was snatched up immediately by some dude in a pickup who had no doubt heard all about Filter Queens.

Sorry about the mouse poop.

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