I often think of this passage from Marguerite Duras' The Lover when I mop my floors. The idea of throwing buckets of water on the floor and watching them sluice through the house fascinates me:
"It takes my mother all of a sudden toward the end of the afternoon, especially in the dry season, and then she'll have the house scrubbed from top to bottom, to clean it through, scour it out, freshen it up, she says. The house is built on a raised strip of land, clear of the garden, the snakes, the scorpions, the red ants, the floodwaters of the Mekong, those that follow the great tornados of the monsoon. Because the house is raised like this it can be cleaned by having buckets of water thrown over it, sluiced right through like a garden. All the chairs are piled up on the tables, the whole house is streaming, water is lapping around the piano in the small sitting room. The water pours down the steps, spreads through the yard toward the kitchen quarters. The little houseboys are delighted, we join in with them, splash one another, then wash the floor with the yellow soap. Everyone's barefoot, including our mother. She laughs. She's got no objection to anything."