My mother was a world champion cleaning freak! There was never a Friday that didn't meet its match in my mother. As soon as she got home from work, she lit into housework like a fire consuming dessicated wood. We had to clean a room of windows every week. Dust would fly and I would think I was going to die from sneezing. Every week we would clean one room deeply and give all the others a once-over. Every night I had to miss Jeopardy to wash the dishes. I could hear it, but never got to see it because the dishes had to be done before we could sit down in the living room to watch anything!
When Nicole was a baby, you could have eaten off my floors. I mopped my kitchen and bathroom every night before I went to bed. Every other day, I vacuumed the floors, dusted imaginary dust, and cleaned the table tops of Nicole's little handprints. When she was eight months old and I was going crazy from being in the house with a little one all day, I went to work at the Boy's Club. I had a 9-6 job with an hour for lunch everyday, a $20,000 a year job and life was good. I also hired my first housekeeper. I thought I was in high cotton. Not only did my housekeeper clean the house, she did the laundry for Freddy and me and did the ironing.
I was such a good "ironer" that my mother hired me out to iron when I was fourteen! I began ironing when I was 5 or 6 years old and distinctly remember being in our house in La Puente, California and mother sending me to the basement to iron her nurses uniform. I came back up the stairs with it and she made me go back and "lick that calf over." It took three times before it was to her satisfaction, but I never had to iron something more than once ever again. There was an ad in the paper on Sand Mountain by husband and wife chiropracters and they needed someone to iron their sheets for their exam tables. I did them so well that they started bringing me their lab coats and then eventually all their clothes. I had liked ironing up until then. We didn't have air conditioning and it was terrible that summer ironing in 120 degree heat in our house! When school started back to my relief Mother told them they'd have to find somebody else. I still never slept on a sheet that wasn't ironed until I was somewhere in my twenties. On occasion I will still iron the part of the sheet that turns back on my bed. Now I iron on Sunday mornings before church and only what Freddy and I need to wear to church.
Now I have the cadillac of irons...a Rowenta steam generator. It is something my mother could have only dreamed of. I will never miss that old G.E. iron my mother had that weighed several pounds and sputtered water on the clothes! Then irons became unbelievably lightweight. They didn't get hot enough to take the wrinkles out of the clothes and I hated them. When Nicole was little and I started smocking I had to have a better iron and became a convert of Rowenta. I used several irons until I burned them flat out. I am on my second steam generator. There is nothing like a well ironed shirt. When I hang a freshly ironed shirt, it looks so crisp, I'm sure my mother would be proud.
Since I started school, I guess I have developed a laissez-faire sort of attitude about housework. Things get piled up before you know it and then you just start overlooking all you can't get to. Of course it doesn't help that I have two packrats in the house. Nicole finds it impossible to throw almost anything away. Freddy is only just a little bit better. My mother was a firm believer in giving things away that we didn't use and every six months, right before Christmas and right after school was out for the summer, we cleaned out closets, drawers, and kitchen cabinets. If we had not used or worn something for six months it was going to the Upper Sand Mountain Thrift Store because that was how mother could help those less fortunate than us and things never piled up around our house. Now it sometimes hurts my heart how my house looks, but today after my last final, I took down the valences and the sheers and cleaned the windows, washed the sheers, scrubbed the valences and I am a happy housewife!
A friend of mine on Facebook said he just looked somewhere else when he saw something dirty at his house and he was about out of places to look! Well, my house had gotten in that condition too...I told him to just do one project a day and in no time his house would be clean. So, between now and starting back to school in January, I am going to get cleaned up! Today, the living and dining room windows, tomorrow the world!
I will get back into my dear departed mother's good graces since I know she is looking down on me and saying, "Sis, it's time to get started!" So...here we go! Today's project is putting up the Christmas decorations and then thoroughly vacuuming the house. The day after that there will be another project beckoning but I will start one day at a time and living life...
