Shortly after we moved here, I decided to get a maid. Wait, that's not true. I decided to get a maid before we ever moved here. It was one of the many benefits of moving to Mexico. I am a wretched house keeper. Everyone who knows me will tell you so. Shortly after we moved here, I hired a maid. And boy, was I delighted.

Lupita is a really great maid. She did a great job of taking care of us and our house. She came in once a week and put everything to rights. She scrubbed the bathrooms and the floors. She made my kitchen sparkle. She put away all the stuff we had dragged out during the week and failed to put away. All my shoes made it back into my closet. The dog beds were taken outside and shaken. She even scrubbed and mopped the terrace.

It was bliss, but it was not to last. The very talented Lupita was only cleaning my house to make ends meet during the low season, Summer. She is a trained massage therapist, but during the Summer there are not many people around to massage. The Fall brought cooler temperatures and the return of the tourists and snow birds. Lupita returned to her chosen profession.

I used to listed to my friends complain about the quality of work they were getting from their maids and secretly laugh at them. I mean, come on, hiring a maid isn't that hard. Smugly secure in my superior maid-hiring skills, I didn't even allow for the possibility of dumb luck. It's amazing the total duality our minds can achieve. I felt no discomfort thinking, "get real, how hard is it to clean a house?" while totally ignoring the idea that anyone who hired me to clean their house would be sorely disappointed. That's why I need a maid. But God was about to punish me for my hubris. In spades.

On Lupita's last day, she brought a cousin as a replacement. I didn't think I was that picky about things. I am a laid-back, go-with-the-flow kinda gal, right? She did everything Lupita told her to do, but not just quite right. There was some little annoyance in everything. The real problem was she wasn't Lupita.

I went a few weeks without a maid. When my house was about to reach critical mass, I hired another maid on the recommendation of a friend. I had the maid come over for an "interview" cleaning, and she did great. That was the last time. In addition to the problems of getting her to show on the appointed day at the appointed time, every time she came she stayed for shorter and shorter periods. And her work got really shoddy. She didn't like walking up and down our stairs. She left food on the dishes she washed. She stopped cleaning the bathrooms. I was paying someone to do a worse job than I would do.

Things came to a head when she came to clean the day I was last in the hospital. Chuck left me at the hospital and came home, at my insistence, to let the maid in. (The house really needed cleaning, and I was in no condition to do it.) She stayed less than two hours.

Before her next scheduled day, I prepared a detailed list in Spanish of the tasks I expected completed. I worked at it for a few hours, then I took it to my friend, Juan, to check for me and make sure everything could be understood. He made a few changes. I printed the list out in a nice, large, readable font, and gave it to her when she showed up. She read the list, told me she understood, and went to work.

She came to me 90 minutes later to tell me she was done. Nothing on my list had been done. I didn't know what to do. I felt the familiar frustration at not having enough Spanish to communicate properly. I know there are lots of people who live here without ever learning any Spanish, but I don't know how they do it. Unable to tell her of my dissatisfactions, I co-cleaned with her for the next 2.5 hours. I showed her everything I wanted done and the way I wanted it done.

When we were finished, she went home, and I sat down, put my feet up, and had a cold Pacifico. Cleaning is hard work! I talked with Chuck about the problem. I felt like an ass for the whole co-cleaning thing, but I really didn't know how else to get my point across. Then I worried about the possibility that the whole session wouldn't cure the problem. I was starting to feel like Emily Gilmore from The Gilmore Girls. It turned out to be a self solving problem: the maid never showed up again.

This time I went more than a month before thinking about a maid again. Then I found out my neighbor, Monica, had started cleaning houses for extra money. Chuck and I had a long talk about it. We know and like Monica, and know her to be a very conscientious and hardworking person. But if it didn't work out, it would be very difficult. She lives next door. In the end, we decided that that having her live next door was a benefit, and we really trust her, plus we were a little desperate, so we asked her if she wanted the job.

We are truly delighted. She works so hard. She always spends longer here than the agreed upon four hours. She finds extra work to do like cleaning windows or scrubbing the inside of the microwave. The joy I felt when we hired Lupita is back. Thursdays are happy days in our house again. It's the day everything gets set to right and sparkles.