View from the North 40: If I get to pick my magical windfall, I'm going big

Barrington, New Jersey resident Louis Angelino III has earned the title of Cleaning Fairy after a Cherry Hill, New Jersey, couple arrived home to find that Angelino had mistakenly entered their home June 28 and not only cleaned the entire townhouse, which was messy from a remodeling project, but also played with and fed the couple’s cats.

Angelino has been cleaning homes on the side to make some extra money and that morning had set out to find and clean the home of a new client. Unfortunately, the NJ.com article says, he had written the address down incorrectly by one number.

He didn’t think anything was amiss because the spare key was hidden under the rug on the front step as it should be, so he entered the home and spent 2½ hours cleaning before the new client contacted him to ask when he was going to clean the house. He texted back to say he was done cleaning and sitting there playing with the cats.

The new client texted back saying, basically, “Cats? I don’t own no stinking cats.” So Angelino and the client left a note for the home owners, who returned home amazed to find their remodeling mess cleaned up and organized before finding the note.

In the end, all confusion was explained and apologies were accepted. In fact it was Barb Motzel, townhouse co-owner, who first called Angelino the Cleaning Fairy.

I’m going to run with that moniker, but I want to point out first that the incident as whole needs to be called what it is — it’s no random act of home sanitation by some new-age cleaning fairy, it’s a flat out miracle.

According to the number of news articles that come up in an online search, you are more likely to win the lottery than have someone break into your home and clean it.

Remember when a construction company took the roofing off the wrong home in Havre in 2015? Yeah, that’s more likely to happen than a surprise burglary session from a cleaning fairy. In fact, by virtue of the number of incidents that came up in any quicky online search, it’s even way more likely your entire home will be mistakenly demolished and the rubble of its existence hauled away than it is to be mistakenly cleaned.

Seriously, headlines screamed “wrong home demolished” in Dallas February 2020; Hammond, Louisiana, August 2020; Detroit December 2019, which was the second incident for this contractor; Fort Worth, Texas, November 2013, and it was a brand new home. Additional headlines popped up from around the world.

To find headlines about homes being accidentally cleaned, I had to widen my acceptance standards to include international headlines with one incident in Sydney, Australia, in December 2020 and another in Halifax, Novia Scotia, in October 2018.

Anyone who knows me knows I would welcome a cleaning fairy any day of the week, but lately I have a lot of other big chores. Since no one’s gotten tetanus at my house yet, I’m going to wish for other secret assistance.

A fencing fairy would be awesome. I’d be willing to sleep on a stack of old posts just in case he’s like the tooth fairy and needs the old items as trade ins. I could’ve used a fire-break-mowing fairy, but I took care of that when we had temps in the 70s that one day this month, I could still use a clean-up-the-edges-with-a-weed-eater fairy if one wants to visit.

I’d also go for a good old-fashioned barn-raising fairy, but if I had my druthers this year, I’d take a horse-hay-locator fairy, like so many other horse and livestock owners.

Unfortunately, if the cleaning fairy is a rare miracle, those other fairies are unobtainable mythical creatures, and I have no hope of seeing their help anytime soon, especially that hay one.

Besides, I’m pretty sure this year a horse-hay-locator fairy would need a strong assist from a fairy godmother and all three wishes from a genie in a bottle, along with the cooperation of a sparkly unicorn with questionable ethics that feeds on grasshoppers and poops gold doubloons.

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I’d have my barn-raising fairy maintain a nice sheltered space indoors for that unicorn — there will be plenty of room without any hay at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .