Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!

“Is someone coming to visit?” Dave wanted to know. “No, why do you ask?” “Because you’re cleaning the bathroom.” He wasn’t trying to be funny, and he wasn’t passing judgement on my sporadic cleaning sprees. In general, the bathroom gets a deep cleaning when we’re having overnight company. It just so happened that we hadn’t had company for a long while, and I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

There was one day when the weather was perfect for gardening — not too hot, a slight breeze tickling the leaves of the poplar trees across from the house — that I had fought and finally won an inner battle to just forget cleaning and go outside. We did, indeed, have company coming, and I really needed to clean that bathroom. “It’s so nice out,” Dave said, when he saw me leaning over the tub with a scrub brush. “Why don’t you clean it another time?” I almost cried.

Dave’s daily work is full of maintenance, too. Vehicle maintenance, chainsaw maintenance, including chain sharpening, mower maintenance, mowing…. but it’s all somewhere that isn’t in the house. There is some difference, it seems to me, when one can shut the door on work and go home. A homemaker lives in the workplace. Sometimes it feels oppressive. My mother would sigh, “Why don’t you kids go outside?” I thought she just wanted time alone. It occurred to me in later years that my mom, a farm girl, would have loved to go outside and dig in the dirt instead of doing the never-ending round of household chores.

My daughter-in-law asked me why my house always looks so clean. I told her it’s because I clean it right before she visits. She sighed. Cleaning is just not high on her priority list. I have sisters who clean their houses — vacuuming, dusting, washing the kitchen floor, and cleaning bathrooms, on schedule, every week. They clean their ovens once a month. Puts me to shame. I just didn’t get the Cleaning Gene they obviously inherited.

There is one thing that I admit to doing almost daily, and I know how I picked up the habit. I can still picture my dad bending down to pick lint off the living room carpet. He did it all the time. It bothered me to see him do that, but now, I do the same thing. Our large, braided rugs are dark, and any little bit of lint jumps right out at me. I drive myself crazy, picking up lint. Can’t stand crumbs on the counter, either.

There was an urban legend when I was a young mother, that women who did not have a job outside the home just sat around all day watching soaps and eating chocolate bon bons. There was a time I would say I did just that when someone, usually a woman, asked me if I worked. It was a snarky thing to say, I know, but I felt that homemaking, a real choice just like other careers, always got a bad rap, and it made me mad.

I might have only been a mother-at-home, but I certainly was busy. Besides the usual round of meals and laundry, I homeschooled my three children in their elementary years, did the bookkeeping for our home business, did some packing and shipping, and in summer had a big vegetable garden. I did a lot of vegetable and fruit canning. Yes, I did work — just no paycheck involved. And I could say, as did my mother before me, “My house was always picked up, but was seldom ever clean.”

These days I keep busy, too. On a typical day I’m up by five. I drink coffee while I read my devotional, check emails and texts and the weather forecast. That little ritual complete, I go for a short run. When I get back, the familiar aroma of scrambled eggs and toast greets me. Dave is the breakfast cook most of the time. After breakfast I revel in the luxury of washing dishes at the kitchen sink while listening to the news or an educational podcast.

Then it’s up for grabs. Maybe I’ll run errands in town or visit a friend. Maybe I’ll go to my favorite egg shop, otherwise known as the X-Tra Grocery, owned by Chris and Anna Gingerich. I might don long pants and shirt and hang my old-fashioned fishing creel over my shoulder and go out to hunt Golden Oysters those prolific but oh-so-tasty invasive mushrooms, or my newly learned fungi, Chanterelles.

Lunch and a short nap during which I sometimes fall asleep, follows all the morning activity. Then it’s time spent in the flower or vegetable gardens, mostly engaging in my version of Feng Shui. I remove the weeds, and voila! I have a beautiful garden. I found a large straw hat on the side of the road some months ago, and now wear it when the sun beats down. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a straw hat. With age comes wisdom and a “who cares, anyway?” attitude. I’ve already had one non-cancerous growth burned off my face, and I don’t want to repeat the experience.

So back to cleaning. It’s really worth it to give the entire house a good once-over if we expect a string of overnight guests. More bang for the buck, as they say. The only things I need to do in between sets of company is to wash the guestroom sheets and give the bathroom a quick once-over.

My housecleaning advice comes from a Ruth Milligan poem. Ruth writes, “Dust if you must, but the world’s out there, With the sun in your eyes, and the wind in your hair; A flutter of snow, a shower of rain, This day will not come around again.”

And I say, Amen to that.

Doreen moved to the woods from Green Bay in 1984, married back-to-the-lander Steve O’Donnell, and stayed to raise their three children after he died in 1997. Dave Short joined her there in 2016. Doreen welcomes feedback at doreenshort2021@gmail.com.

Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!

I have had the opportunity to meet and listen to each of the candidates running for the 3rd Congressional District to fill Ron Kind’s seat. I …

Political ad not appropriate for front page

A little over a year ago, on July 8, 2021 the Wisconsin State Budget was enacted. The budget process is a lengthy one, and lays out the invest…

Support Pfaff, Fritsche in the primary

The closer I pedaled to Stoddard this morning (Tuesday, July 26), I could hear the beep beep beep of back up warnings and the snarl of chainsa…

It’s almost the end of July. Time for one more car trip if you can afford it, with gasoline prices so high. There was a time, long before ever…

Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.