One Lesson I Learned From My Mom - Cleanliness

My friend Karen has given a challenge for those in our Author's Incognito group to blog every day for the rest of May about 25 Lessons Learned from Mom in honor of Mother's Day. I know I've neglected this blog page for the past month, so this will get me back here writing every day.

I'm not going to list the things my mother has taught me in order of importance, because I haven't had time to list all of them yet. Instead, I'm going to tell about them as I think of them. I usually learn most from watching someone.

As a young child, I remember I could always bring someone home to our house and know it would be clean. My mother kept an immaculate house. Someone once told my father that they thought they could probably eat off the kitchen floor because it was so clean. Every week she mopped and waxed the floor. When we children came home from school many times we would find newspapers spread across the floor. That meant we had to be careful because mom had just finished cleaning the floor.

Besides keeping the house clean, she also taught us to keep it clean. We all had chores we were expected to do daily and Saturday was spent with everyone doing their share.

Everyone helped with the laundry on Saturday, because it wasn't a simple job. The old washing machine was pulled into the kitchen and filled with soap and water. A rinse tub was brought in and filled with hot steaming water. After the clothes were washed and rinsed we put each piece through the wringer into a basket and then took it outside to hang on the lines to dry.

As a child I didn't appreciate all the hard work, but as an adult I've always been grateful for the lessons my mother taught. I learned how to clean house because of the example of my mother.