Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
“The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down.
No, I didn’t have to mount a daring raid to rescue my ironing board from an international gang of ironing-board abductors (if such things there be).
When I read this post from the Dreamstress, I realized that the cover of my ironing board needed replacing too – had needed it, according to my comment, for about the last ten years. So naturally, having waited for the Seven Years of Symbolic Significance to pass since then, this week I did something about it.
Continue & CommentJust recently I received an early inheritance (the best kind, because no one dies). It is a book that once belonged to my grandmother. Written by Peg Bracken, and published in 1963, it is entitled The I Hate To Housekeep Book – subtitled When and how to keep house without losing your mind.
It’s for women who don’t want to live in a pit of filth, nor be 24/7 spotless housekeepers, nor go about nursing grudges against all the housework they find themselves doing.
“Consider, for a moment, your spotless housekeeper. She housekeeps most of the time, apportioning various chores to different days: Tuesday morning is ironing morning. She calls this Not letting the House Get On Top Of Her.
“But the occasional housekeeper doesn’t know she’ll be ironing that day, nor does she care to. It would depress her to know that this was the shape and colour of next Tuesday morning. She would rather just let it happen, should an ill-natured Providence so decree.”
