One of the advantages of getting old is that nobody is too surprised when you don’t get the housework done up to previous standards. It has taken the first ninety years of my life, but I’ve finally gotten to the place where nobody expects to find my kitchen stove spatter-free and the refrigerator free of odd smells and mysterious substances. To be honest, I admit that I avoid those routine chores that never stay done – those things they call “house-keeping.” The operative word there is “keeping” and that makes it abundantly clear that it is a never-ending prospect.
I’ve never understood or sympathized with those people we used to call “house proud”; those women who never allowed toys and shoes to accumulate on the stairs, whose bathrooms always smelled like lavender and displayed neatly folded monogrammed towels, and whose kitchen counters were free of empty soup cans, spilled coffee grounds, unopened mail, damp dishtowels, over-due library books, food-stained cookbooks and the kids’ forgotten homework. I always suspected that those women would never answer the door to even their best friend unless everything was dusted, vacuumed, polished, Air-Wicked or tucked away in its assigned place.
I thank my mother for passing on her belief that an orderly, antiseptic house was not the epitome of excellence when it came to being a homemaker. She once told me that she would never ask me or my sisters to do something that she herself didn’t want to do. Thus, I never became proficient at toilet scrubbing, dusting the legs of the dining room table and chairs, displaying magazines artfully on the coffee table, or making my bed every morning. Mother was always busy. The things that occupied her day were important and appreciated and made our lives richer and happier and had little to do with tautly fitted sofa slipcovers or matching silverware. She tried to make the necessary chores as easy and as near to fun as possible. And she was very good at keeping it from being boring.
I remember coming home from school in late February or March and finding all the furniture shoved to one side of the living room and Mother on all fours by the heat register. “Help me get this grate off,” she’d say, “I think there are some marbles and a spoon down there.” While I fished for possible treasure in the dusty heating duct, she cleaned and polished the golden oak mopboard on that side of the room. Instead of putting the furniture back where it usually was, she opted for something more creative and adventurous.
“Let’s change things around a little” she’d suggest. “Could we put the sofa against that other wall for a change? And your dad’s big chair and the floor lamp would fit in this cozy corner. Maybe we could move the piano a little more that way – what do you think?” The little oval table where we played cards and where I did my homework was relocated and the framed copy of a Robert Wood landscape rehung, then we tried out the various new seating arrangements. We hadn’t added or removed a single thing, but the room was changed dramatically. Too dramatically. It just didn’t feel like home.
Dad verified my sense of unease when he complained that he couldn’t see the street in front of the house from his relocated chair, and he preferred the reading lamp on the end-table to the cumbersome floor lamp. Within a week, all the furnishings were back in their usual locations and the coffee table sported the one addition – a wooden bowl filled with silk flowers from the dime store.
Why did she rearrange the same furniture time and again when it had been in the best arrangement all along? Because housework is a crashing bore, that’s why. Mother would never have gone out on their own and purchased a major piece of furniture or expensive new carpet to make a real difference in the appearance of the room. She could shove the furniture around or spend a couple dollars for some new little thing to give her spirits a lift and break the monotony of keeping the house in order. And she always managed to sneak in a little house-cleaning in the process.