Do Not Pass Go by Kirkpatrick Hill

mess in the morning.
    He could find only one more quotation about housework.
    M RS . P RITCHARD : I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.
    M RS . O GMORE -P RITCHARD : And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.
    â€”DYLAN THOMAS
    Deet wrote both quotations in his notebook and then doodled on his desk pad for a few minutes, thinking about housework. He remembered that they were out of Scotch tape, so he made a new list for Mom, Things to Buy on Saturday. He wrote “Scotch tape” under that, and then he jumped up to stick the list on the refrigerator, under Jam’s Elmo magnet.
    Then he started to write.
    There were only these two quotations about housework in the quotation book.
    That seems really funny, because everyone has a house, or a place to live, and someone has to clean that place, and do the laundry and wash the dishes and take care of everything, so it’s a very important subject, isn’t it? But hardly anybody has said any thing famous about it.
    Maybe that’s because the people who say things that become famous quotations didn’t do their own housework. Just Montaigne. You can tell he did. Whoever he was.
    When you do housework, there are a lot of things you do that no one notices. Nobody says, oh, you vacuumed the floor, or you washed out the tub, unless the rug and the tub were so grungy that anyone would notice an improvement. Our house was always messy, but I never noticed that it was always clean. I just noticed that there was stuff all over, not put away neatly.
    Now that I’m doing the housework since my mom went back to work, I can see all the things I didn’t notice before. You can clean out the refrigerator all you like, but all the other peoplein the family are going to mess it up faster than you can blink. I feel really touchy about people messing things up now, so I know what “mind it wipes its shoes” means. This is the job you do, cleaning a house, and people come along at any minute and mess it up. And don’t even notice. I actually say things like, “Put that glass away,” or “Wipe up that spill.” I feel really silly after I’ve said something like that. My mom was never fussy; she never said things like that when she was cleaning the house.
    There are a million people all over the world, billions of people, most of them women probably, who have discovered all this and more about taking care of a house. It’s the not noticing that is the worst, I think. What if you tried to talk about what you did that day. “I scrubbed the floor this morning, and was it a mess. Took me a half hour on my hands and knees.” The most you’d get would be a look. Not much conversation material in that. No wonder housewives felt unappreciated. No wonder there was women’s lib.
    Like housework, cooking was a lot more complicated than it looked, but it got a lot more comments. One night Deet made that kind of macaroni and cheese that comes in a box, but the next day he asked Sally how to make it from scratch, so they had it again, only this time it was much better, with lots of real cheese melting all over the macaroni. The girls seemed a little surprised to have the same thing two nights in a row. Deet didn’t think he’d mind eating the same thing for a
week
, if it was something he liked.
    After that Deet got out his mom’s recipe box to look for ideas. He decided to make his grandma’s famous meatballs. Swedish meatballs. In white gravy. Unbelievably good, they just melted in your mouth.
    He had a bad moment when he found that he needed sour cream, but he found some in the refrigerator, way in the back. There was a nasty patch of blue mold on the edge of the carton, but he scraped it off and used the rest.
    They were easy to make, Swedish meatballs, but they wouldn’t stay balls. They flattened out on him when they cooked. They were almost meat squares. P. J. and Jam didn’t think