Confessions of a Danish Housewife

Whether you celebrate the astronomical equinox on March 19th or the more traditional one on the 21st, Spring is when most people waken to a house that needs a good housecleaning.

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Finally, today I finished washing the big windows. If I were worthy of my Danish Housewife badge, though, I would have cleaned and polished ALL the windows inside and out, until they reflected the universe better than the James West telescope. Of course, I would have even tackled the dust-infused sills and baseboards, evicting spiders and their dead leftovers by the score. While it's only been thirteen years since we moved here, maybe a deep cleaning is due.

Alas, I am a grave disappointment as a Danish Housewife. Indeed, I have a lot of nerve to even insinuate that I am of that elite group, DNA notwithstanding. Danish yes. My mother's ancestors came from Denmark. Somewhere along the genetic route to ME, however, the gene pool got diluted and, much like my Baby Boomer feminist associates, I really care about housework. There is a planet to save and gender pronouns to be observed.

Sigh … that right there exhausts me with its implications.

As I discovered when we moved from the Truckee house, if you don't do regular deep cleanings at least once a year, your house will start to grow fur. In our case, it was a mishmash of Queensland, Beardie, feline, and human.

Because my MIL's family also came from Denmark, the Danish obsession to do anything correctly and perfectly runs hot in his veins. Our running joke is to remind ourselves, mainly Jeff, to stop being so Danish and go out to play.

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Yesterday, for example, he lay in the hammock after struggling to build a structure in which to pour cement for a cold frame garden. Mind you, this framework will be removed after the cement dries, but Jeff lay there, obsessing about a twist in one of the boards he used to build the blasted thing.

"Stop being so Danish," I stated in a decibel level that bounced off the neighbor's house. He grinned as he usually does whenever we toss that phrase around. I often wonder, though, where we'd be if Jeff wasn't so earnest about properly and completely dotting the I's and crossing the T's. As I mentioned earlier, I don't care about details, and I would be in a pretty sorry state of affairs if I didn't have Jeff around to do all the paperwork.

I do try, upon occasion, to push my flagging energies toward some major household chore that I need to do at least once or twice a year. Cleaning windows, for instance, is something I did regularly in the Truckee house because the windows also served as part of our passive solar heating. If you are going to use the sun to warm up your house, you must allow it IN. Just a patina of dust can cut the sun's efficiency. How's that for Danish!

So, all the windows would be washed to let in the light. And I' would clean out the woodstove pipe every year. Truly a dirty job worthy of Mike Rowe, but there was a certain cachet for my ability to save money doing that. Before you get too excited about the little woman climbing up on a precarious roof be play chimney sweep, the Hobbit House had a flat roof that was easily accessible by walking up the dirt hill packed against the back of the house. The entire job took about an hour and left me with barely a bead of sweat upon my brow. The hardest part was carrying the twelve-foot-long handled brush from the garage to the back of the house.

Big deal! While my Danish-American mother may have been a tad impressed with that, she did chores on a regular basis that would probably send most women these days into major swoons.

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She laundered clothes in an old Maytag ringer washer and hung them outside to dry. Then she would get down on her hands and knees to scour the tile floor, telling me as she passed this chore on to me that her mother would grab bucket and brush to scrub deep into the corners whenever she got really upset. It was an old-fashion method of mental health care.

Of course, there was the rule that my bed had to be made before I went to school, not when I came home for lunch. "Half the day's gone and your bed is still not made."

So?

Oh, I was a rebellious little wart! What battles we had over a dirty dish! I swore I wouldn't do that to my daughter. Well, she knows how to clean a house, but Valerie refused to clean her room while living with us. With hands on hips, she announced it was her way to rebel. She didn't use drugs, got straight A's, and spent most of her time with her horse. So, there was an uneasy truce as I closed the door on her room.

At least once, maybe twice a year, Mom would wash the curtains. These days, it is easy to just throw the panels into the washer and dryer and be done with it. Right?

These were 100% cotton Priscilla curtains that, once they went through a wash cycle in Mom's Maytag, had to be ironed. Every little ruffle around those full-length curtains needed to be pressed. That was after the curtains had been stretched onto curtain frames that held the main panels taut to prevent them from wrinkling while drying. Tiny little pins an inch apart in the frame held those suckers in place. All her fingertips were raw by the end of it.

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While the curtains dried, she and Dad would wash windows. I complain about swabbing my huge single-pane windows, swirling the squeegie like a pro. Mom's windows were made up of several 7X9 panes of glass halfway. And then, while they were at it, there was woodwork to be cleaned to a bright sheen.

Woodwork? When I wanted to throw a shower for a friend, Mom moved into high gear, painting the long grimy door, window, and baseboard trims to a glossy white. Then she saw the need for new wallpaper. And …..! Poor Dad.

"Why don't we just take off the front doorknob and install a whole new house."

Don't even say "new house" to Mom. That was her ultimate dream: a new house. Lookielooing was her hobby: driving through all the new subdivisions and attending all the home shows around town. I chaperoned and caught the bug.

Dad would help with cleaning the windows and woodwork and after Mom died, he'd tell me that he was busy cleaning the house. Actually, he was washing the windows and the woodwork, and that was all he knew how to do. The carpets moldered in cat urine. He ate out all the time to avoid dishwashing. And his bathroom? Well, let's not go there.

He even delighted in a plant that had wormed its way between the outer shingles and the wallboard to emerge into the dining room from behind the baseboard. Funny thing about when wives die. No matter what kind of housekeeper they were, when they are no longer "running the household," everything takes on a sodden pall.

That's why archeologists have to dig. The housewife hasn't swept the hearth for a long time.

I always knew, as a housewife, I was a hopeless case. I didn't realize how much so until Valerie and I started helping some elderly friends of ours in Santa Cruz. Ed Sundberg was my storytelling mentor in those days, and his wife, Gerda, was a sweet lady who enlivened our meetings with her humor and cooking. She and Ed had a mixed marriage. He was Swedish and she was Danish. She told me how his family would often shake their heads and tell him, "Well, you need to remember, Edvard, she IS Danish."

When Ed's health declined, she asked us if we would like to come help her with some household chores a couple of times a month. We both loved Gerda and Ed and felt privileged to do so after all they had done for me.

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While I vacuumed and dusted, Valerie and Gerda tackled some kitchen chore. One day, I found them changing out the paper liners in the drawers. How cute, I thought. I hadn't cleaned out my kitchen drawers since we'd moved into the house. This would be good training for Valerie. And me.

Gerda looked at the date she had penciled in the corner of each paper and gasped, "Oh dear, I haven't changed these liners in four months!"

Now that's Danish!

My mother insisted my sister and I do our chores without fail. There was the above mentioned bed controversy. Washing dishes became the cause of major warfare. My bedroom was cleaned weekly, and toys, clothes, and other stuff were shelled out every six months. A ten-minute tour around the house with the vacuum didn't even begin to accomplish that task.

"Did you move the couch and lounge chairs to clean under them?" Seriously, Mom?

Before I left Salt Lake City, I never met anyone who had a housemaid. That was a concept that whupped me upside the head when a roommate told me how poor her family was because they only had one maid. What could I say to that?

"Gee, my mother had two maids … me and my sister.

My daughter managed to marry a man who is far more diligent with cleaning. Both of them work high-stress jobs and are parents of a tiny tornado. Although they share the chores, their house gets quite cluttered after awhile. Since they added a little girl to their brood, the toys either stay scattered across the floor or are banked against the wall like fireplace embers. Frankly, I am impressed they have the energy to do anything after they have fed the chickens and horse and herded cats at the office.

Once a month, they will team up for a weekend binge of housework. Let's face it, though, despite such efforts, nothing makes a house shine more than couch-moving thorough vacuuming, and mopping of windowsills and baseboards. Clear away the cobwebs and dust the walls. Yes, the walls! Get into those cupboards and drawers with vigor and a pencil!

Maybe that's why Boomer women have this need to relocate often. The house just gets too dingy to bear and they have to buy a new one. HGTV doesn't make it any easier to be content with what one has. Maybe Gen-Z has the right idea. Minimalism! It's easier to clean when one doesn't have a lot of stuff … and there's an app for Merry Maids.

If you enjoyed this essay, feel free to explore other essays, poems, and stories in the Ring Around the Basin Archives.