This morning I'll finish editing a manuscript and send it to the author. Then I'll do some prep for my essay class. Then I'll do some prep for band practice. Then I'll pack my dinner and an overnight bag. Then I'll walk to my afternoon class at the high school. Then I'll walk home, grab my bags and my violin, and drive two and a half hours north for band practice. Then, after practice, I'll drive 40 minutes south to my friend's house in the woods. And the unanswered question is: Has the thaw set in and transformed her road into the LaBrea tar pits, and will I have to trudge a half-mile in the gloppy dark, lugging a violin and an overnight bag? Only time will tell.

Finally I'm beginning to make some real progress on my housework essay. I still don't know where it's going or what it might do once it gets there, but sentences are flowing and paragraphs are sprouting, and my reading life has gone haywire, in a very good way.

Of course this would happen in the midst of an incredibly busy week, when I am obligated to do many, many things that have nothing to do with staying home and constructing an essay. By the time I'm back to wandering around the rooms and staring out the windows, will all of my writing pep have dissolved?

Pep is a word with a fine old-fashioned huckster feel. Just saying it makes me feel as if I should drink a few bromides or get started on my Indian-club exercises. Care to join me?

This was how your great-great-grandmother started her week. Keep in mind that "one wash, one boiling, and one rinse used about fifty gallons of water--or four hundred pounds--which had to be moved from pump or well or faucet to stove and tub, in buckets and wash boilers that might weigh as much as forty or fifty pounds."

Without miracle fabrics, washing machines, or detergents, getting clothes really clean was a complicated process, described in almost identical detail by [household-advice writers] Catharine Beecher in 1841 and Helen Campbell forty years later as the "common mode of washing." Sort the clothes first by color, fabric, and degree of soil, they suggested, and soak them overnight in separate tubs full of warm water; with few soaps or washing fluids, overnight soaking saved "considerable labor." The next morning, drain off that water and pour hot suds on the finest clothes. . . . Wash each article in that suds bath, rubbing it against the washboard. Wring them out, rub soap on the most soiled spots, then cover them with water in the boiler on the stove and "boil them up." . . . Take them out of the boiler, rub dirty spots again, rinse in plain water, wring out, rinse again in water with bluing, wring very dry, dip the articles to be stiffened in starch, and wring once more. Hang clothes on the line until perfectly dry. And while that load is on the line, repeat the entire process on progressively coarser and dirtier loads of clothes. (from "Blue Monday," in Susan Strasser's Never Done: A History of American Housework)

Imagine the work this would involve, just for two people. Now imagine a family with ten children, or with boarders (very common in, say, the coal fields). Now imagine trying to get brick dust out of those clothes, or consider the fate of the clean clothes on the line in a town where the air is full of industrial soot. Imagine the amount of fuel (coal or wood) necessary to haul to keep those stoves at top heat for boiling these enormous quantities of water. Imagine trying to wring out long wool dresses by hand. Imagine babies crawling around the kitchen, getting burnt on stoves or scalded by spilled water. Imagine all of the ironing that came next. And then imagine you repeat this chore, Monday after Monday after Monday, for the rest of your life.

Our forecast today calls for "rain/snow/then heavy rain"--a prediction hinting darkly at glop, terrible driving, ugly walkways, and wet basements--but as of yet there is nothing: only the trembling air, only the sky sagging quietly through the bare trees.

This week will be crammed full of obligation: editing, two classes, one mentor session, two trips north for band stuff. So I suppose I'll spend today doing housework. It seems like the logical thing to do on a messy Sunday, though, for the moment, I'm not feeling too enthusiastic. Mostly I don't mind housework; I take great pleasure in clean counters, bright bathrooms, a stack of folded towels, a polished table. Eventually I'll stop imagining that a fairy-friend godmother will swoop through the storm to curl up next to me on the couch and regale me with dense and cozy conversation. I think that is not in the forecast.

On the next two Saturdays I've got band gigs up north, so this is my last free weekend for a while. Today is forecast to be mild and beautiful, and Tom and I are considering the possibility of driving down to Old Orchard Beach and looking at big waves, if time and chores so allow. Tomorrow we're supposed to get more snow, of course. Winter has no intention of letting us off the hook, though these constant thaws are disorienting and seductive.

I've been reading Strasser's history of housework, prepping for my essay class, and yesterday I spent a couple of hours volunteering as a writing mentor in a community project for people who are or have experienced homelessness. Given the vicissitudes of this particular population, no one can be sure who will show up every week, but this time two young men came to tell their stories and talk about what they'd read, their hopes for the future, the chaos of their past and present, their comic anecdotes about being in bands and listening to their moms. My thoughts, which, in light of my sons, are naturally tender to young men, flickered back and forth among distress, anger, laughter, shock, curiosity, impatience--all the feelings one might have around kids who have so much to give themselves and the world but who also have so much of a propensity to shoot themselves in the head.

I have no idea if these young men will show up again next week, but I will. I need to learn how to be a better teacher.

I'm going to send out a little note of praise and thanks to my Thursday-evening essay-workshop class. These people lift my spirits every week: they are so eager to talk about the readings, so cogent and kind and acute about each other's drafts. And the drafts they've submitted are so full of interest, so worth studying and learning from. This class is a complete joy, a gift from the teaching gods.

As a result, I stand here at my desk on this bright and chilly Friday morning in late February, lifted up in spirit. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That verse from the Book of John can sometimes feel like lived experience.

from Never Done: A History of American Housework by Susan Strasser

Many of the changes in housework matched changes in other kinds of work during the long process of industrialization. Shorter hours and better working conditions--less hard, constant physical labor, in safer and more comfortable circumstances--distinguish twentieth-century housework as they distinguish other twentieth-century labor. Like other workers, the housewife lost control of her work process; manufacturers exerted their control on her through product design and advertising rather than through direct supervision. The clock and the calendar replaced the sun as arbiter of everyone's time. Yet the isolation of the full-time housewife increased. While other workers went to work in groups, however thoroughly supervised, full-time housewives lost the growing daughters and full-time servants who worked with them at home, the iceman and the street vendors who came to their houses, the sewing circle and the group of women around the well. That isolation, combined with the illusory individualism of consumerism, intensified the notion that individuals could control their private lives at home, protected behind the portals of their houses from the domination of others: the central legacy of the doctrine of separate spheres.


* * *


Disappointed Women

Dawn Potter

They lived in filth. Or were horribly clean.

They piled scrapple onto dark platters.

They poured milk and ignored the phone.

They arranged stones on windowsills.

They filled lists and emptied shelves.

They dyed their hair in the sink.

One stored a Bible in the bathroom.

One hoarded paper in the dining room.

One stared at Lolita and stirred the soup.

When I say emptied I mean they wanted to feel.

When I say filled I mean they wanted to jump.

When I say bathroom, dining room, soup I mean

I washed my hands.

I sat at the table.

I ate what they gave me.

[first published in the Portland Press Herald, November 6, 2016]