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I’m getting ready to spring clean my office and when I think of spring cleaning, my mind recalls images of my Mom, me and my sisters with brooms, mops, buckets, scrub brushes, rags, furniture polish, bleach, starch, and lots of elbow grease. Every spring, just before Mother’s Day, as soon as Dad and my brother went to work, we would tackle the annual house cleaning. Dad and my brother worked the afternoon shift so when we girls got home from school, we were ready to work up a storm until bedtime. Even though I was quite young, I still had to work as hard as the older ones. This ritual usually went on from Monday through Friday and was always done by Dad’s days off on the weekend. The house was a wreck for a week every spring but it sure looked and smelled so good when we were finished cleaning.
In the late 1950s, we lived in a small town in northeastern Ohio and our little house only had four small rooms and a kitchen. Our bathroom was a toilet and shower in a corner of a dark, dank basement. We heated with coal so after a long winter, there was lots soot and winter dirt everywhere. Each room, except the kitchen, had to be cleaned from top to bottom. Mom considered the kitchen her domain so she always cleaned...
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