Good Housekeeping

I'm not sure exactly how many years I've had my cleaning people come every two weeks, but it's well over 20 years. Before we had cleaning people, we just kept up, mopping up after ourselves as we went along, making sure nothing got out of control, then doing some sort of lick and a promise overall cleaning on Saturday morning. This worked. We were pretty neat. You'd never find a stack of old newspapers on the floor, or a pizza box with decaying crusts on the table. So the place never looked unclean.

Then for some reason - perhaps because my husband and I both found cleaning a colossal drag, perhaps because we begrudged any attention we had to pay to it, perhaps because our cleaning efforts always caused a bit of tension - we got cleaning people. At first, we had Cintia and Susana, who were from Brazil. When they went back home, they passed their business over to Fernanda. At first, she worked with her son; now she works with her husband Luiz.

They are wonderful. Reliable, completely trustworthy, and quite good cleaning people.

My husband used to say that he'd get a job as a clerk in the 7-11 before he'd give up the cleaning people. When I did my reno a few years back, I paid them for the three months I was out of my condo, out of fairness and out of fear of losing them.

And now I'm paying them for the duration of the coronavirus shutdown.

So now I'm back doing my own cleaning.

Having grown up as an older girl in a large-enough family (5 kids) in the 1950's and 1960's, I'm no stranger to cleaning the house.

Throughout our childhood, my sister Kath and I did housework. During the school week, we took laundry off the line (our family had no dryer) and folded it. We ironed. We took out the garbage, burned the trash in the back yard barrel, and hauled out the bottles and cans for the can man to pick up. We changed diapers and fed and walked the squalling baby. We peeled potatoes and cracked walnuts. We set the table. We were responsible for going through the weekly grocery delivery to make sure everything had been delivered, and that there were no overcharges or undercharges. (No small feat, given that grocery store receipts back then just had prices on them, not the name of the item. So we had to take the item out of the carton, check it against my mother's written list, then find something of that price on the mile-long cash register receipt to check off.)

Remarkably, the one chore we didn't have to do was washing the dishes. Oh, every once in a while my mother decided that one of us would wash and the other dry, but mostly she did the dishes (our family had no dishwasher) with my father, and I think they enjoyed their time to catch up.

Saturday mornings, our indenture really kicked in. We dust mopped, dusted, polished, vacuumed, scrubbed toilets, scoured sinks and tubs, polished faucets. etc.

We then pitched in on yard work, mosty raking, although I believe that Kath was my father's trusted adjutant when it came to the lawn. (My outdoor specialty was hosing and bleaching out the garbage can if it had maggots.)

I really should ask, but I don't remember my brothers (who were younger than us) ever doing anything other than raking. Maybe they shoveled?

My father became ill (kidney disease) for the first time when Kath and I were in high school, and if he was hospitalized during the summer, there were plenty of days when we were responsible for running the household while my mother stayed by my father's bedside.

One of my favorite memories - you had to be there - was the day the shelves in the fridge all decided to collapse. There we were, standing in the kitchen amidst all the broken glass and seeping liquids: a gallon of milk, a gallon Tupperware of beef noodle soup, a half gallon of cranberry juice, a pickle jar. Hershey's syrup. For a few seconds we just stood there, taking it all in.

Then we sprung into action. Shutting my sister Trish and her little pal Tucker out of the kitchen, screaming at them not to come in. (All that broken glass. They must have been about 5 years old.) Then cleaning up the kitchen floor, making sure we didn't cut ourselves in the process. (And finding canned goods to prop up the broken fridge shelves - a fix that stayed in place for years.)

We knew, of course, that cleaning the kitchen floor wasn't going to do it for us.

So, off we went to the cellar, where all that liquid had seeped through the floor boards and was puddling next to the washing machine.

Fortunately, my mother always kept an ample supply of rags in boxes under the cellar stairs. (Worn out PJ's, shirts with no more use in them - but only after we'd cut off all the buttons and saved them in the button box, threadbare towels.)

After mopping up and and hosing down the cellar floor, we washed a load of rags. Because heaven forbid you toss out a perfectly good rag. Besides, if we didn't wash them, they'd smell of sour milk.

Anyway, my childhood amply prepared me for house cleaning. It just never got me to like it. (For the record, the favorite household chore for all three of the Rogers sisters is laundry. The Irish Washerwomen 'r Us.)

And here I am doing the cleaning. Or not.

So far, I've kept it to the kitchens and bathrooms, but I've been so focused on degerming everything, I haven't been paying attention to the specific cleaners that are purpose-made for different purposes. Lysol lemon spray may kill 99.99% of germs, but it leaves the induction cooktop streaky. And it leaves the stainless appliances - which would be all the appliances - streaky, too. Sanitized, but streaky.

This all left me so exhausted that I had no energy to devote to washing the kitchen floor. I did sweep up whatever was there, but thank god I took my sister Kath's advice on kitchen floor tiling when I reno'd. My floor used to be what my husband and I called self-dirtying. The new one barely shows the dirt. So once I cleared off the bits of carrot peelings, the stray sunflower seeds, the English muffin crumbs, it looks pretty clean. I'm not so worried about sanitizing. It's not like I'm going to eat off the floor. (I've suspended the five second rule for the duration.)

Things look okay in the living room for now, but there'll come a point in the next week or so when I'll need to get dusting, dust mopping, and vacuuming. I know where my vaccum cleaner is, but it's an oldie. It's a good one - an Oreck - but it's pushing 30. Fernanda and Luiz bring their own vacuum with. I suppose if this drags on, I'll have to get myself a spiffy modern Dyson.

Anyway, cleaning my own house is a small sacrifice, but, man, will I be happy when this is all over and done with.