It’s a Boat

It’s no secret that aside from cooking and baking, I don’t like housework. One of my sisters long ago tried to sell me on it by telling me cleaning is therapeutic. Apparently that worked for her but she wasn’t ever able to convince me. I clean when I absolutely have to but I’ll go a long way to find other things to do. Taking long walks. Reading. Quilting. Baking. Writing. Poking myself in the eye with a sharp stick. Well, maybe not that last one, but you get the idea. A friend who came for dinner last week took it upon himself to clean the top of the range hood in the kitchen. No way was I offended, it was great! My neglect of things related to general housework publicly came to light when we lived in Kentucky and our kids were small. Our family was at a community center with a lot of people. There was an ironing board lying folded and upside down in a corner. Our oldest kid stood on it and proudly pronounced, “Look, Mom! A boat!” He didn’t even know what an ironing board was. My own mother seemed to be constantly cleaning, scrubbing, vacuuming, bleaching, sanitizing. Everything in our house always looked clean but it didn’t seem to me she had time to do much of anything else. One time when I was newly married and my mother visited, I still remember her running a finger across the top of a picture frame. Of course, her finger came back dusty. She was also a stickler for dressing properly. When I was about to go out the door I often heard, “Are you going to wear that?” Some of that was the times, some of it was my mother. Maybe she thought people would have been judgmental and maybe they would have been. She wanted us always to dress in what she thought was appropriate. That’s something I love here in the Pacific Northwest. Casual is the byword in pretty much any situation. So if you want to come and see me, I would welcome a visit. Come to see me. And overlook the small cobweb that may lurk in a corner.

Photo courtesy Myriams-Fotos at Pixabay.com