Housework

‘I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again’.

That wasn’t me but quite a well known quote by Joan Rivers. But it brought to mind an occasion from when I was about twelve years old and my Mom had been persuaded to let her friend’s son practise his spiel as a Dyson vacuum salesman. Obviously she cleaned the living room from top to bottom and especially the carpet (not that it needed doing). The evening arrived and he set up the machine and proceeded to push the thing across the greyish (I think) carpet. And leaving a broad lighter shade behind him.

Mom was mortified but I learned a valuable lesson. No matter how clean a place looks there will always be a layer of something under the surface.

But I wouldn’t go as far as Erma Bomback’s theory on housework which is, ‘if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?’

I’m going to come back to Erma later for my all time favourite quote on housework but for the moment I would like to consider a few other American female writers and their thoughts on the subject.

For instance, Phyllis Diller: ‘Housework won't kill you, but then again, why take the chance?’ And this: ‘I buried a lot of my ironing in the back yard.’ And again: ‘I'm eighteen years behind in my ironing. There's no use doing it now, it doesn't fit anybody I know.’

She also gave us (well, me) a more practical tip and I do love this: ‘If your house is really a mess and a stranger comes to the door greet him with, 'Who could have done this? We have no enemies!'’

I’m reluctant to plunge into what is considered a clean house but I will reproduce this by the American writer Tiffany Dufu: ‘We obsess about things that honestly aren’t important in the scheme of things, because you’ve been socialised to attach your value to those things...A well-managed home is still a gendered expectation...A man who places a high priority on domestic cleanliness is just a clean man; a woman who doesn’t is a bad woman.’

Stephen Marche argues that ‘The hope of the future is for us all to do less: “Housework is perhaps the only political problem in which doing less and not caring are the solution’

New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait states “I like having magazines strewn across the coffee table. My wife doesn’t. I won’t protest when she stacks them up somewhere, but when she does it, I don’t regard it as her participation in the shared household duties.”

Let’s just go back to Phyllis Diller: ‘Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shovelling the walk before it stops snowing.’

And as I promised earlier. Here is my all time favourite housework quote and it is by the very wonderful Erma Bombeck: ‘My second favourite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.’

Scurryfunge

I said it’s an old word
for a type of sponge
used to clean new chinos
she asked was I trying to make a point

and given that my first effort
had been a disease of tree roots
exposed to miles of mud
she was absolutely spot on

she was also the one with the map
so my next guess was
walking too fast to appreciate
undergrowth in beautiful woodland

she gave me a look that suggested
I play the game
or I’d have plenty of time
to be cleaning my jeans
boots, carpets, sink
and the whole damn house
before she’d be driving over
to pick me up again.

First published by ‘the north’ in Feb ’21

Terry Q.