Clean freaks

I don’t see why clean people have to be portrayed as ‘freaks’ but I suppose it is possible to take cleaning to compulsive status. I have very little experience personally with this ‘clean freak’ notion, but I am one that does like some semblance of organization.

 

I am certain that our upbringing helps program our brain as either clean and organized or messy and cluttered. Fortunately, my mother was on the clean and organized side of the chart and her example always helped me want to do as she did.

 

With 10 children in my family, our house had a dozen people squashed into about 3,000 square feet of floor space. Divided out, each of us would have had 250 square feet to live in but that’s not how things work. Take out the areas of the house that take up space but you can’t really live in, like the utility room, the laundry room and bedroom closets, and it boils down to a 12 X 12 space for each person.

 

The equation gets more complicated around the time that the family is trying to go someplace, say church or school. We were fortunate to have four bathrooms in our house so we didn’t experience the typical bottle neck that having only one or two bathrooms would create.

 

Oddly enough, our house also had four kitchens. When my father built our house he did so with the future in mind. Once his children were raised he planned on renting out two apartments in the basement and one on the second floor. This is where the four kitchens came from as well as the four bathrooms. Because of the size of our family, someone always had a kitchen for his or her bedroom.

 

Our house had the laundry in the basement, which meant our mother had to haul all those clothes up as many as two flights of stairs. When our clothes were dirty we would simply throw them down to the bottom of the basement stairs. I don’t know how she did it, but my mom would find a way to keep all those clothes caught up.

 

For a long time we washed dishes by hand. When we did get a dishwasher on wheels we still had so many dishes that somebody still had to do some of them by hand. I don’t know where the habit comes from but half of my siblings to this day will pick up a clean glass from the cupboard and blow into it, as if that would make a dirty glass clean.

 

There was a time when rather than purchase a new sofa when the old cushions wore out, our father would take them to Art Collins, a neighbor who did upholstery in his garage, to be re-covered. I’m sure my mother hated the fact that the sofa cushions didn’t match, but the room was always uncluttered and clean.

 

I don’t know how she found time, but our mother always had time to dust what little furniture she owned.

 

I had friends who had much nicer ‘things’ than we had, but I never remember their mothers keeping up the house quite as well as my mother did. I don’t say that to put them down but rather to complement my mother for the extra work she always put into being a clean freak!