I need to clean my house. It’s a task that I care less about everyday. I find myself wondering when I quit doing spring cleaning and I don’t seem to notice smudged windows or dusty chair rails anymore. The floors need mopped but if I wear slippers, I don’t notice the sticky spots on the kitchen floor.

My Mom is probably the best housekeeper I know. The saying “her floors were clean enough that you could eat off of them” was written about her. When my kids were young, you could eat off the floors in my house, too. On any given day, there’d be a whole smorgasbord under the kitchen table. You’d just have to beat the dog to the tastiest morsels.

As a child, I can remember having my share of chores. Judging by the complaints listed in my diaries, I wasn’t all that fond of doing them then either! Prior to moving to West Virginia, cleaning our one bathroom was by far the most hated job. Fortunately, I had siblings and we all took our turn. We vacuumed and dusted, washed and dried dishes, and made our beds daily, something that I still feel obligated to do. I can remember folding laundry but we weren’t in charge of washing our own clothes. I also helped my Mom hang clothes on the clothesline. I can remember taking them back off the line and shaking the bugs off of them before putting them in the basket.

One of my favorite jobs was sprinkling the clothes with water and rolling them up, ready to be ironed. At some point, I helped iron the easy things, like pillow cases, and I liked watching them steam when the hot iron ran across the damp fabric. I don’t think I ever ironed anything important. I’m pretty sure my Mom still ironed my clothes when I was in high school. I know that there hasn’t been much ironing happening with my clothes since I became an adult. Because I’m just a few steps beyond normal, I am strictly a wash and wear kind of girl.

When my oldest son was three, he was given a vocabulary test. The speech pathologist was concerned that he didn’t know what an iron was. She was shocked when I told her that he had never seen one. I owned one, but if I needed to iron, I did it after my toddler was in bed.