Summer Chores

What a nice day we had. It was really warm this morning, but a front went through that dropped the temperatures a bit. We got radical and turned off the air conditioning for awhile this afternoon – the humidity induced us to turn it back on after an hour or so.

We had a nice walk at the indoor walking track today. Some friends arrived just before we did, so we enjoyed visiting during our exercise. I ended up cleaning the fridge this afternoon, as well as dusting and cleaning the bathroom. It's not often that I do housecleaning in the afternoon – somehow, it just seems foreign to me.

When I was growing up on the farm, Mom worked part time for neighbors who had a chicken farm and sold eggs. Most of the year she worked from eight in the morning until noon, helping the wife get those eggs checked out and ready to go to the stores, hospitals, nursing homes, and other customers.

That meant that during summer break, I had my daily chore list from her of the things I was supposed to accomplish before she got home at noon. I hated that list. I'm not a fan of housework, and I never have been. But there were seven rooms in that farmhouse and cleaning chores that had to be done.

Every day, I had to pull up all the throw rugs (we had linoleum floors), take them outside and shake them. While they were up, I was to sweep the floors and then the front porch. After the rugs were back in their places, it was time to dust. Since we lived in a gravel road, it was easy for Mom to tell if I'd done a thorough job or not. There were breakfast dishes to be done, water buckets to be filled, and other chores. Did it take long? No. But it wasn't fun. Those were the times I really wished for siblings, so the chores could be divided!!

One chore I particularly hated was defrosting the fridge. I think Mom got tired of it as well, because that often was my job in the summer. Our fridge was so tiny. On the outside it was only five feet high. So the inside was really small. The freezer was tiny, and it required weekly defrosting during the humid summer months in order for us to fit in a week's worth of meat. If it were really hot and humid, we sometimes had to defrost twice a week. I was grown before mom got a larger fridge and a deep freeze. I'm sure she really enjoyed it.

I can barely remember when I was really small and we had several milk cows. Many people in the neighborhood had a few milk cows, and a milk truck had a regular route to pick up the cans of milk everyone had. I don't remember if the truck came every day or not – but I have strong memories of that tiny fridge being the only way we had of storing the milk can so the milk didn't spoil! The milk can took up most of the room inside the fridge - we couldn't have had much else in there.

I enjoy the memories of growing up on the farm – but I REALLY enjoy a self-defrosting fridge!