By Bob Chrisman
In my mind it’s too early to think of spring cleaning. As I write that sentence my thoughts veer off in another direction. I never clean my house unless company will arrive within a few hours. Those little cleaning spurts only touch the surface dirt and clutter, not at all like spring cleaning, but sufficient to fool guests into thinking I live in a neat, tidy and clean house.
Spring cleaning to me means days of going after the accumulated dirt of the winter. My mother took down all the sheers and curtains and washed them in the wringer washer. She fed them through the rollers to press the water out and then rinsed them before sending them through the wringer and into an empty wash tub. When she finished she hung everything outside on the clothesline to dry in the sun and wind.
As the laundry dried in the fresh air, she donned her rubber gloves and armed with old rags and a bucket of water went after the windows inside and out as my father removed the storm windows and replaced them with the screen windows. He took the screen windows out of storage in the basement, wiped them down and leaned them against the house. He started the removal of the storms at the front of the house and washed and dried them before he took them to the basement to store until fall cleaning.
Mom climbed the step ladder placed next to the house and washed the window panes and window sills. Then she wiped them dry. My sister and I stood inside and pointed out spots that she missed until she handed us a bucket and a sponge and we became her assistants.
Once the window panes sparkled and Dad had installed all of the screens, Mom would open every window in the house to “air out the place.” This airing occurred regardless of the outside temperature and lasted long enough for her to proclaim that the air inside was fresh.
She washed and waxed the wood floors throughout the house in the early years. After we installed linoleum in the kitchen and wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room, she would polish the kitchen floor until it gleamed and take her Kirby upright sweeper to the rug in the living room.
Just writing about it makes me tired. I think I’ll go take a nap and think about spring cleaning on a smaller scale when I wake up. Or, maybe I won’t think about it at all anymore.
-Related to Topic post: WRITING TOPIC – SPRING CLEANING (HOMEMADE CLEANING REMEDIES). Also related to posts: PRACTICE — Spring Cleaning — 10min by QuoinMonkey, WRITING TOPIC — CLEANLINESS, WRITING TOPIC — WINDOW, and Wanda Wooley — The Lean Green Clean Machine.
[NOTE: SPRING CLEANING was a Writing Topic on red Ravine. Frequent guest writer Bob Chrisman joined QuoinMonkey in doing a Writing Practice on the topic.]
Bob,
I really enjoyed reading the descriptions of your home’s spring cleaning. There’s an old-fashioned touch to it…a time not so long ago that we’ve forgotten it, but one that is fading, fading. The fresh sheets from the line, the fresh air in the house, the sparkling windows. It makes me long a little bit for those times.
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I had forgotten about my dad removing the storm windows and replacing them with the screen windows. I even have some of the old storms in my basement but have never hung them on my house especially with the new windows I had installed. That fact just came to me while I was writing the timed piece. Funny what the mind keeps, isn’t it?
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[…] Comments « PRACTICE — SPRING CLEANING — 10min […]
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This is to both Bob & Teri,
I enjoyed both practices very much…what different approaches! Both made me nostalgic, but in different ways. Growing up in LA, I never knew about storm windows until I married and moved to ND! But I remember well the wringer-type washing machine and watching the inky blue liquid that my mother poured forth from a small bottle, swirl its way through the rinse water, and wondering how that was going to make the “whites whiter,” and the wonderful fragrance of laundry that has dried natually in sunshine and breeze.
Can’t remember my 50th, but fondly recall two years later when I “made my stage debut at age 52!” I confess…all my life I wanted to be an actress, but a lot of things “got in the way.” Too many to list here; but when our community theatre was going to produce “Arsenic & Old Lace,” I decided it was now or never, and auditioned for the part of one of the wacky Aunties. Well, I never had any more fun in my life! “Steel Magnolias” was next…as Clairee, my favorite line from that play;
“If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone…come sit by me!”
Nostalgically yours,
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oliverowl, my mother’s wringer washer broke in the late 1980’s. She called the local appliance store and asked for them to order a new one for her. The young woman burst out laughing and then apologized. “Mrs. Chrisman, they don’t make those kind of washing machines anymore.”
Mom looked at me. “Can you believe that? They don’t make wringer washers anymore.” She shook her head in disbelief.
Congratulations on your acting career. Better to do it late than not at all.
I forgotten all about bluing, the inky blue liquid that made things whiter, until I read you comment.
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Bob, I think you proved QM’s theory that houses were much cleaner when we were children. 8) Wow, I can just see your mother in her rubber gloves working the cleaning like a machine. I wish I could get down and dirty with my cleaning like that. I’m a piddling cleaner: do some dishes, read an article. Sweep the floor, sit in the sun. Wipe off counters, check email.
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Roma, I think houses had to be cleaned more thoroughly because they were opened up in the spring and into the fall. Then closed up tight (as tight as those old houses could be) and allowed to fester for the cold months. With air-conditioning and some houses closed up all year, dirt doesn’t have as much chance to accumulate. Just a thought.
I don’t clean in a piddling way. I don’t clean unless company is expected.
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Bob, thank you for doing Writing Practice with me on red Ravine. I appreciate the support. I remember my grandmother’s wringer washer, Granny in Tennessee. I used to love to watch her in the basement by the railroad tracks, working at her wringer washer. There was a certain smell to those days: clean, damp, humid.
oliverowl, no storm windows! It’s hard for me to imagine life without storm windows. But I must not have had them when I lived in Georgia and South Carolina either. I know it snowed in Tennessee. I distinctly remember the snow one year. BTW, you may not have become the actress you wanted to become, but you influenced and passed on your passion and love of acting to others, especially the young. In my book, that is noble and grand.
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