SHE BENDS OVER THE UTILITY SINK, her galvanized bucket receiving a stream of scalding hot water, and pours granules of Spic-N-Span through the clouds of steam.
On this average 1950s Saturday night, in her small town, she sets up her tools, preparing for the task ahead.
Like all the other farmwives, she has lived through a week of dirty boots tracking mud across her floors, spilled milk, and wrestling children. The black-and-white checkerboard of the kitchen floor is covered with the evidence.
Like all the other farmwives, Sunday is her day. In the morning she will put on her seamed stockings and her best dress, and she will go to church.
After the service is over, after the men have stood in circles and smoked outside, after the weather has been discussed and diseases of cattle reviewed, she will go back to her house. Someone will come by—the minister, some in-laws, someone she sees only on Sunday at church—and she will serve them coffee, and the cake she made for Sunday.
But before her company arrives, she will put her house in order. No matter how tired she is, no matter how much work she has done, on Sunday morning her kitchen floor will be clean.
So on Saturday night, after all the children are bathed, their hair wound into pincurls, their tiny Sunday clothes ironed and hung up for tomorrow, she mops the floor.
And in all the other farms for miles around, lights glow from kitchen windows, making silhouettes of farmwives, mothers all, dedicated workers with reddened hands, purposefully stroking ragmops across old linoleum, bending over steaming buckets, their last task before sleep and a Sunday of rest.
IF SHE WANTED TO, MY MOTHER COULD STILL MOP A MEAN FLOOR. In a few days, she will be 73 years old, but her years at hard labor on the farm have only made her strong.
Now she has a no-wax floor, but it still needs tending, and she still frets after a week of grandkids, a mud-footed husband and good old Wenatchee clay have left their marks.
I keep this image of my mother because she still mops the floor, and she does it with the same pride and craftsmanship she demonstrated on the old farmhouse linoleum.
It’s not so much that I want to be a good farmwife and mother or match my mother’s energy level. And I confess: I do not mop my kitchen floor once a week.
In a sense, I learned more about meeting goals and getting things done from watching my mother on Saturday night than I ever learned after we left the farm.
That floor had to be mopped, not to teach her daughter a lesson about work, or even to make a favorable impression on the neighbors. It had to be mopped so my mother could have time to herself, to create a pure spot of joy in her hard life.
When she woke up a few hours later she could indulge in a moment of pride, standing in the kitchen doorway and seeing the pristine white squares against the shiny black ones. She had done a hard job well for her own pleasure.
WHEN I MOP MY FLOOR, IT’S NO ACCIDENT THAT I DO IT ON SATURDAY NIGHT, with all the lights off in the house but the one in the kitchen. And while I stroke my modern sponge mop across the black-and-white squares of my no-wax vinyl, I fall into a trance made of love and reverence for my mother.
I HAVE WRITTEN THIS STORY IN MY HEAD on every Saturday night that I mopped my own floor, trying to imagine how it felt to be a woman with eight children, living on a farm in the 1950s.
Like any good daughter, I feel shy but intrigued when I try to stand in my mother’s shoes. But I do know how she felt, because she still feels that way today.
When I go to visit after she’s cleaned the kitchen, she says, “Look at my floor! Isn’t it clean?” After all these years, it still brings her joy.
She taught me how to mop a floor, but that’s not all I learned. My mother taught me how to do a hard job well for my own pleasure.
