Long ago when I was a mere youth dancing around doing household chores with a spring in my step and a song in my heart, learning how to clean house was a mandatory life lesson. I didn’t take it too seriously at that point, but as time went by, the importance of being a good housekeeper was a theme my mother returned to on a daily basis. It became a real bore.
Certainly, most people want and need a well-maintained home – one that is clean, orderly and presentable to any neighbor who might drop in unexpectedly. Thus, keeping one’s home clean at all times was drummed into my head.
And then there were those two yearly clean-outs: spring and fall housecleaning. These were major seasonal events that required all hands be on deck. If your family was financially able, then the lady of the house could hire help for a week of hard labor. If not, then the female children in the home would have to suffice. Enter yours truly.
Spring and fall housecleaning meant everything in the home had to be moved, cleaned around, up, over, and then washed if necessary to within a tiny thread of becoming dissolved forever in soapy water.
At an early age, I was introduced to these two cyclical events in our home. It would start with my mother noting the season. If it were advancing on Memorial Day, spring housecleaning had to be planned. If it were advancing on Halloween, fall housecleaning needed to begin. The pressure was immense for these week-long massive cleaning marathons that essentially determined the degree of a woman’s capabilities as a competent homemaker. Failure was not an option.
The cleaning would begin with the windows.
Window washing was a major undertaking in days when simple soap and water or ammonia and water were the cleaning agents available to the homemaker and her minions.
Curtains had to be removed, washed, hung outside to dry in the freshening air, then ironed and rehung or stored away. Oftentimes curtains became the flag flown to show all the world that this home was well managed for winter curtains would come down and the lighter summer version went up or vice versa. Signal flags of a homemaker for sure.
While the curtains and shades were removed and cleaned, the windows were washed to the point of seeming invisibility. If it were fall housecleaning, this included the washing and installation of storm windows.
And it wasn’t only the windows that were cleaned. It was the sills both inside and out and everything around them. Walls were dusted down; maybe a fresh coat of paint was required to finish off the room. No effort was spared.
Every item in every room was washed in warm water and soap, polished to a high luster, or dusted chasing away cobwebs, spider webs, and dust kitties to a waiting dust bin.
Furniture cushions were pounded outdoors to release dust mites or had vacuum attachments plunged into their nether-parts like urgent internal exams at a doctor’s office. You could almost hear the upholstered couches and side-chairs cry out in their outrage of being violated by zealous cleaners.
Floors were last, always last. First they were swept, and then they were washed with strong agents and heavy mops. After being allowed to thoroughly dry, waxes were applied and polishing followed. They glistened as the sun shone through the now crystal-clear windows.
In the kitchen, there were the appliances that required special and extra cleaning. All the dishes and tools stored on kitchen shelves were placed on the table and washed before returning to their allotted spots on the recently cleaned shelves now complete with new shelf paper.
The bedrooms, mattresses and pillows, closets and clothing all received specific types of fresh air treatments or old-fashioned cleaning.
In my mother’s world, these seasonal hazings were critical. To shirk one’s duty as a homemaker and forego spring and fall housecleaning meant you were incompetent, unworthy, and worse yet, dirty.
In her later years when she could no longer scrub, wash, polish, iron, fold, dust, sweep, or mop her home and the belongings therein, my mother sometimes wept. These talents had proven her worth as a human being, as a woman in full, as a master homemaker. Ma’s control over her universe was becoming less, and she grieved the passing of her strength.
Years later when she was confined to the nursing home barely able to leave her bed or wheelchair, she condemned the facility’s cleaners as ‘useless.’ She’d say, “They have no idea how to clean anything.” She’d observe a piece of paper or food particle for days as it lay unnoticed by the daily sweeping and mopping that passed for cleaning. “They only run that mop over the middle of the room. What good is that?” she’d declare with a note of disdain. She’d often bemoan, “They don’t even give this place an honest lick and a promise.”
I knew she was nearing the end when her complaints over the cleanliness of her surroundings became fewer and further between. At the very end when I’d visit her, sometimes I’d notice the same piece of dirt in the same corner week after week. It annoyed me to my core.
Recently as I was out walking in Mattapoisett village, I passed an acquaintance that was industriously employed washing her windows and putting up the storms. I complemented her on the hard work. She chuckled responded, “Oh, it’s just a lick and a promise.”
If you don’t know, “a lick and a promise” is an old-fashioned phrase meaning to do an inadequate job cleaning something, usually one’s home.
I must confess, my home receives just a lick and a promise from me most of the time. I’ve opted to spend more time enjoying the outdoors, visiting with friends, reading, napping, writing, gardening, cooking, or almost anything but cleaning. Yet, in homage to my mother, at least once a year I turn each room inside out, just not on a seasonal schedule. As I whisk a mop under a bed or chase a spider from a corner it called home for months, I think of my mother and know she’d have a comment regarding my lackadaisical housecleaning – it would be something like “that’s not even a lick and a promise.”
Postscript: After writing this, I felt tremendous guilt. Ma invested a great deal imparting her housekeeping talents to me and I have failed. So I cleaned until the beauty of this post-Thanksgiving got the better of me. Then I walked, sending quiet promises to Ma that I would do better when the weather turned cold and my entertainment options diminished to nothing more than cleaning out a closet.
By Marilou Newell
