Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Think-Back Tuesday: Chores

Now that my older three children are scarcely here except to eat, sleep, shower, and do homework, many of the chores they once did are being slowly passed down to Joel. Lucky him. He is 9. I remember that turning 9 was a rite of passage when I was a girl: it meant that Mama taught you how to clean a bathroom and that weekly chore became yours. Woo-hoo! And to think that some girls got their ears pierced instead.

For today's Think-Back Tuesday, here are the questions. Feel free to copy-and-paste to your blog and link back here so we can read your answers.

1. What is the earliest chore you remember being taught to do? Did you like the chore? Did it make you feel grown up? Do you still do the chore the way you were taught?

I remember my mom teaching me how to make my bed. I was probably four or five. She's always been what I'd call "fussy" (perfectionistic) about bed-making. She does "hospital corners" when making a bed up with clean sheets. For the pillow part, she taught me to remove the pillows, take the top cover all the way to the top of the bed, turn it down generously, lay the pillows back on with a fluff and a smoothing--so much smoothing you'd think the things had been ironed--then cover the pillows and run your hand under the pillow one last time. I liked the way the bed looked with her method, but admit I don't do all that. I prefer taking sheet and cover to the top, standing the regular pillows on their narrow edge and then setting "sham pillows" in front of those. If I had my druthers, "I'd ruther" have a few decorative accent pillows on the bed as well, but my hubby despises them as useless clutter and a waste of money.

2. What chore(s) did you enjoy as a child or teenager?

None of them except taking the trash out to the big barrel to burn. (Rural Kansas ritual.) About every couple of weeks we'd have enough in there to start a fire, so Daddy did that while the rest of us cooked hotdogs and roasted marshmallows. It's sick now to think we were eating the ashes of trashes! But science tells me, like it told Mama, that temperatures that hot would kill all germs.


3. Did you have to do dishes, and if so, how regularly, and how were you taught to do dishes? (Seems everyone has their own "right way" of doing things.)

Here's the thing when it came to dishes and other chores. I was the middle child of three for most of my young life, and it was most unfortunate when my mother would say, "You two big girls need to do such-and-such, or you two little girls do such-and-such. " Think about it. I don't remember "Rachel and Andrea, you do such-and-such." No, I was always stuck as either a big girl or a little girl. But I'm not bitter.

As for dishes, my mom would tell one of us to clear the table, one to wash, and one to dry. That kept all three of us busy after dinner. The water had to be as close to scalding as we could endure, and the water changed often. If it wasn't clear and sudsy, it wasn't doing the dishes " a lick of good," Mama said. She has made me a hater of anything less than super-hot, clean soapy dish water. Rinsing, she insisted, also had to be under hot water. (I think she took a course in microbiology at KU Nursing School, and she was always seeing germs no one else could even imagine.) I still do dishes this way, except that I rarely towel-dry the hand-washables. God made air to help me out a bit on that one. Besides, as my aunt Belva says, "No towel will ever be cleaner than air."

3. What was your most dreaded chore? Why?

Cleaning the bathroom. Why? Because the tub had to be scrubbed with Comet till every last ring was off and all the porcelain was shining like baby teeth. The toilet had to be cleaned "all around the base real well." And you weren't allowed to be quick about it. In Mama's book, fast cleaners are not thorough cleaners. I have since outgrown that adage. The faster I can move about the chores, the sooner I can get on with stuff I actually like to do.


4. Did you "spring clean" and if so, what were the hallmarks of the annual event? What did you "have to do" for it to count as "spring cleaning"? What was your role and attitude?

Yes, we spring cleaned. The big things I remember: windows (inside and out, Daddy on the ladder outside), baseboards, and books. How I hated dusting every.single.book. Have I told you about my parents' library? Most people only dust their books when they're moving, right? Well, maybe the tradition of moving annually started this spring cleaning tradition as well. Oh, and we had to wash walls. Slowly. Thoroughly. Changing hot water often. Not all of us, just "you two big girls or you two little girls." Do I have to spell out my attitude toward spring cleaning back then?

5. Do you spring clean now that you're grown up?

Yes. Sort of. Not every cubic or square inch, but at least the things I rarely get to (things over my head, literally). Nowadays I like to throw open the windows on warm, breezy, sunny April days (of which there have been only three so far, and non-consecutive). For me the hallmark of spring cleaning is changing the window treatments, throwing out old makeup, and investing in new shoes. Because nothing says "Done!" like a trip to the shoe store. It puts the "merry" in "merry maid." Picturing a new pair of treads keeps me going when the going gets rough. Or when the scalding hot water has to be changed when wiping my ceiling fan down.

Your turn! Here's the rag...

1 comment:

Susan Kane said...

I grew up in Illinois, and I think our mothers are maybe sisters. I identified with everything you said! I don't spring clean, though. I no longer try to say I do, but that would be lying. Looking forward to following you.