It got me to thinking about something my grandmother used to say a lot: "Sweep around your own doorstep first." I'll have to admit I got tired of hearing her say this, I reckon because sometime it came too close to home. She usually said this when I was criticizing some friend or family member.
I can remember using this expression only once myself, on my second wife. I am convinced that woman only married me as a project to change me. She woke up correcting my behavior and the last thing she had to say at night was about her observations of my actions during the day. Lord knows I needed remediation in several areas, but her methods did nothing to change me and provoked a passive aggressive (I think that's what you call it) response to her prodding. I decided one day to give her a dose of her own medicine and boy did that backfire. I simply mentioned that when she finished cooking, her kitchen looked like an L.A. street gang had spent the night there. She cried for three days, didn't speak to me for a week, and installed a barbwire fence down the middle of our bed. A week later she broke the cold war when she noticed a dirty sock I had left just under the bed.
After she was hit and killed by that streetcar in New Orleans, I did mourn her loss. There were many things about her I missed. Her constant badgering was not among them.
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