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Jewish World Review Nov. 4, 2005 / 2 Mar-Cheshvan, 5766 Be sure to get those dustballs behind the stove By Lori Borgman
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Our newly married son and daughter-in-law are living in a charming, vintage walk-up in Chicago.
Vintage is code for 1920s and small closets. Charming means radiators that tilt like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and walk-up means that by the time you climb four flights of stairs, you don't need a door key because you can huff and puff and blow the door down.
One of the apartment's true charms is found in the rear stairwell. On thick, old wood painted front-porch green, hanging next to the kitchen door, are three metal hooks. Three hooks were all any woman needed in the 1920s: one for a broom, one for a dust mop and one for a string mop.
If the women of yesteryear could see us now. We have the exact the same dirt, but 10,000 times the products and equipment for getting rid of it.
Most of us need a minimum of three hooks just for brooms — straw broom, an angled broom, a push broom, a whisk broom.
Some days it is hard to believe I grew up in a house with only one vacuum. Today, people have a vacuum for the carpet, a vacuum for the hardwoods, a Dirt Devil for the car, a shop vac in the basement and a hand vac in the kitchen.
And let's not forget the Roomba, the small robot vacuum that cleans while you lounge with a cup of coffee.
All of which leads one to ask: Does the advanced technology and a pathological obsession with anti-bacterial everything mean my home is neater and cleaner than my mother's home?
Absolutely not. I may have more orange scented de-greasers, but nobody had more reasons to clean than my mother.
‘Let's tidy up the house before we leave.’
I never understood why we should tidy up if we were not going to be home. Who were we tidying up for? Burglars? Would they only take the television and leave the jewelry as a sign of gratitude for a house that was not in disarray?
‘Let's put things in order before going to bed.’
The thinking was that nobody likes to wake up to a messy house, especially not a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes.
As a result of all this tidying up whenever we left and whenever we went to bed, our house was at its very neatest when we were either sleeping or gone.
We cleaned because company was coming, and we cleaned because company had just left.
There was another occasion that always prompted my mother to clean, and that was surgery. My mother had a number of surgeries in her lifetime and before each and every one we had to give the house a top-to-bottom cleaning, including pulling out the stove and cleaning behind it, because, ‘Well, just in case, you never know.’
To this day, whenever I hear a middle-age woman is having surgery, my first thought is, ‘That's too bad, but I bet there's not a single dust ball lurking behind her stove.’
As newlyweds, my husband and I had our first argument over cleaning. I was of the Every Saturday Morning Cleaning School and he was of the Only When You Can Write Your Name in the Dust School. He argued that if I cleaned every week, I would wear out the furniture.
After 27 years of keeping house, I suddenly find myself more willing to consider his side of the argument.
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JWR contributor Lori Borgman is the author of , most recently, "Pass the Faith, Please" (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.) and I Was a Better Mother Before I Had Kids To comment, please click here. To visit her website click here.
© 2005, Lori Borgman
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Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
