Less than a year ago, we purchased new carpeting for our family room and hall. We hadn’t replaced the original carpeting in at least 15 years, and it had been tracked on by us, our child, his friends (most of whom were burly high school football players), a variety of family members, and many pets. It was in sad shape.

            So I was thrilled that, now that our son was an adult and had moved out, we could get new carpeting for the most-used room in our house. The hallway runs parallel to the family room and goes to the mudroom. On the other side of the hallway, also parallel, is our kitchen. It is sort of a “great” room, with a wide entrance from the kitchen, through the hall and into the family room, but the hall itself is about 3 feet wide and 15 feet long.

            Less than a year. Which is why I was so mad at myself in March when I took a bag of kitchen trash to the back door to put in out in the trashcan. I walked through the kitchen and down the hall and when I got to the back door, I noticed something dripping onto my foot. Some kind of nasty, awful, thick grease was leaking out of my “leakproof” kitchen trash bag!  It had drizzled all through the kitchen (which thankfully has a ceramic and easily cleaned floor) and all through the hallway in a lazy “S” pattern. Grease.

            My mom would have said, “I just can’t have nice things.” And I had done this myself. I raced the bag to the trash can, cleaned up the mudroom (linoleum) and kitchen floors, and grabbed the spray bottle of stain remover and a large rag. It’s a name-brand, supposedly effective stain remover and I squirted and scrubbed and squirted and scrubbed all the way down the path of that grease in the hall.

            The stain laughed. I tried another brand of stain remover, one guaranteed to remove any and all stains. Scrubbing and scrubbing left me a small patch at the very beginning of the stain that appeared to be gone.

            It was back the next day.

            We borrowed a carpet cleaner from friends and cleaned the entire area, even the family room. The carpet looked brand new. I went over the stained portion about seven times and the stain was gone!  It looked wonderful.

            It was back the next day, chortling at me with malicious glee.

            Meanwhile, the pandemic had hit hard and I was staying at home with that evil stain, running the length of my hall and mocking me every day.

            Then, the solution appeared – as if by magic – on my Amazon page. I was searching for vacuum cleaner filter replacements, when a “recommendation” came up for a little throw rug. Aha!  Inspiration struck.

            Just days later, I received my 2’ 7” wide, 12’ long carpet runner. It fits nicely in the hall, as though we had planned it that way from the beginning. And it’s just wide enough to cover the wandering stain fully.

            Who’s laughing now, greasepot?