Spring Cleaning

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 that room herself while we were in school. Each of us took a room and the first thing we did was get a ball of wall paper cleaner to rub down the wall paper to remove dust and soot. Once that was done, we would scrub the wood work, clean the windows, wash the chandeliers, polish the furniture, and scrub and wax the linoleum floors. While we girls were busy cleaning wall paper and scrubbing wood work, and so on, Mom was washing curtains, doilies, sheets, quilts and bed spreads. She didn’t have a clothes dryer so she would dry the curtains on curtain stretchers, starch and pin the doilies to cardboard and hang the sheets and other bed clothes on the line to air dry. I can still smell the fresh aroma of those line dried sheets.

On Saturday after the house was spic and span, Mom would make our favorite dinner. It was a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe passed down from my grandmother. Mom boiled potatoes and topped them with lettuce, onions, bacon and sour gravy along with homemade bread soaked in butter. For dessert, she would make us root beer floats made with homemade root beer and ice cream. We didn’t expect to be paid money for our work but we did look forward to this meal and the dessert that followed.

The house has long since been replaced by a six lane highway, Mom, Dad, my brother and sisters have all passed but the memories still remain. Every year at this time I think back to less hectic times and the special fun we had Spring Cleaning.

Now back to spring cleaning my office.