CATHIE SHAFFER: Blame it on genetics

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May 11, 2009

Anonymous The Daily Independent Mon May 11, 2009, 09:39 PM EDT

Since life is, unfortunately, unfair, I inherited the wrong trait from my paternal grandmother.

She was a country woman, solid and sensible, and with hips the width of a midsized battleship. She also was one of those women who genetically are driven toward cleanliness. Not only did she spring and fall clean, she pre-cleaned for them.

Mom, as we called her, was a great believer in the old adage of having a place for everything and putting everything in its place. From the time I was old enough to poke into drawers without getting yelled at until the day she moved into a nursing home, nothing changed in her house.

I knew automatically where to find everything from the box of assorted greeting cards in the bottom kitchen drawer to the stack of Reader’s Digests on the second shelf of a whatnot table in their living room.

Mom took pride in her things, whether it was her dishes or her darning. She could apply a patch to old jeans with surgical precision and her date pinwheel cookies were always all the exact same size.

I’m sure she spent many hours worrying over what would happen to me when I went out on my own. You see, no one was ever as different from my orderly, obsessive grandmother than me.

This time of year, she’d spring into action. Painted walls would be scrubbed down, floors mopped and waxed and rugs cleaned down to the smallest thread.

She’d marshall the forces — her husband, her son, any other unfortunate soul to wander by — for mattress flipping and window washing.

I wish I felt compelled to tie a scarf around my head, roll up my sleeves and do the same thing. I would blame it on a change in societal norms and modern expectations for women which exceed simply being a housewife, but those are just excuses.

The truth is, the world is full of fun and interesting experiences, few of which take place in the confines of my dusty, messy house.

Case in point: On Saturday, determined to restore some sort of order to a dining room gone jungle, I sorted out an entire trash bag of things to be tossed. And, in the spirit of doing things right, I immediately carried that bag out to the trash can.

The recent rain has made weeds grow, so I decided to take a moment or two to pull the worst of the weeds from the blocks by the trash container. Once those were out, I realized how badly the lawn needed mowing.

It didn’t take long to trim down the front yard and start the back. When the mower ran out of gas, I decided to let it cool off — and me, too.

Sitting down with a glass of iced tea, in my comfy recliner, I pretty much forgot my goal of the day. My mind wandered to other things – like what to have for supper and what time the NASCAR race began — and I made a choice that would have horrified my grandmother.

That’s right. I walked right past my messy dining room table and on to the car for a well-earned ice cream cone.

CATHIE SHAFFER can be reached at (606) 473-9851 or mizcathie@yahoo.com

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