What the Little Green Machine Learned

The Little Green Machine arrived on a Tuesday in a box that promised miracles. BW had ordered it after the dog came in from the yard looking like he'd been through a mud wrestling tournament, which, knowing the dog, he probably had. The carpet in the living room looked like a crime scene. A wet crime scene.

I assembled it. Instructions were straightforward enough, which should have been my first warning. Straightforward instructions mean the machine is about to meet the child.

The Little Green Machine was confident when I first plugged it in. You could hear it. That kind of whirring that says I was built for this moment. I sucked up the mud. I got the water out. The carpet actually looked like carpet again. BW nodded. This was the nod that means I'd made the right call for once.

For three days, the Little Green Machine sat in the garage, resting in its corner like a small green soldier. It had done its job. It had earned a break.

Then the child noticed it.

Not the machine itself—that would have been fine. She noticed the tank. The full tank. The one with the dirty water from the carpet. She wanted to know what would happen if she pressed the trigger while the intake hose was pointed at the wall of the garage.

I found her standing there. The machine was still running. The wall was weeping. She had that look on her face like she'd just discovered penicillin, not ruined both the Little Green Machine and my ability to park the Uber in here without everything smelling like a water-damaged hotel.

The Little Green Machine knew what it had been before. It remembered being new. It remembered the promise in BW's voice when she unboxed it. It had believed in the work. It had believed in the mud removal. It had believed that this was what it was for—to make things clean again, to fix what was broken.

Now it sat in the garage corner with a child's handprints dried on its tank. One of the wheels didn't roll right anymore. The smell it made was no longer the smell of cleaning. It was the smell of knowledge.

I rinsed it out. That's what you do. You rinse it out and you put it back in the corner and you learn to park the Uber on the street. BW asked if it still worked. I said yes. It still works. (It works the way everything works around here now—in spite of, not because of. In survival mode, not in purpose mode.)

The Little Green Machine hasn't been used since. Sometimes I think about the mud on that carpet, how it was waiting for something smaller and more innocent to come along and clean it up the right way.

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