What the Little Green Machine Learned

The Little Green Machine arrived on a Tuesday. I unboxed it in the garage while BW watched from the doorway with her arms crossed, which meant she had already decided whether this was going to work or not. (It was going to work. BW decides these things.) The machine was bright green. Aggressively green. The kind of green that makes you think someone at the factory was having a very specific day.

It sat in the corner for three weeks.

Then the dog came in from the yard during a thaw and decided the living room carpet was the right place to process his feelings about mud. I found BW standing over it with the same arms-crossed expression. She pointed at the garage.

I got the Little Green Machine.

Here's what the Little Green Machine did not expect: it would become a toy. Within six minutes of me filling it with hot water and that blue concentrate, the child appeared. She watched me work a section of carpet. She watched the gray water collect in the tank. She watched the carpet transform from mud-brown back to something that might have once been beige.

"Can I try?" she asked.

"No," I said.

BW was in the kitchen. I could feel her not looking up from her phone.

The child tried anyway. Somehow she had already rewound the power cord around the machine's handle in a way that made it look like it was wearing a headlock. She had also located a permanent marker and drawn what appeared to be a face on the water tank. A face. Two dots and a line, the way a five-year-old draws a face, except the child is seven and knows better, and the Little Green Machine definitely had not consented to this.

I removed the marker. I unwound the cord. I explained that some things are tools, not toys.

The Little Green Machine has been back in the corner for two months now. The carpet is clean again (the dog learned nothing). But something in its plastic has changed. It sits there with that drawn-on face, which we could scrub off but haven't, which might be the worst thing that happens to an appliance—not being used at all, but being remembered as something other than what it was made to be.

BW said yesterday that she could rent the hardware store version again.

I told her the Little Green Machine was probably fine where it was.

Neither of us moved it.

If you liked this story about the Bissell Little Green Machine Portable Carpet Cleaner, you can buy your own on Amazon. Remember, we're BFF if you do.