Cleaning House, more RECIPES from Aunt Elsie

I have been away from my home the past five weekends and every other for the month previous. In the basement today I wash what I need for yet another week absent. The limestone walls and wide boards around me shift and crack; they are like the last child retrieved long after play practice's end.

Summer’s promise of heat has been fulfilled and I select all the minimal clothing I own to put in my black duffel. It rests comfortably within its rectangle of dust beside my bed—the bag is half unpacked from last weekend, no, from all summer.

My home waits in chaos to become a haven I desire, a place of restorative meals and solace. My hand reaches for a card in Aunt Elsie’s box filed under Old Fashioned Remedy—

For Washing down walls

From Martha Ruege

1 bar of naphtha soap

1 cup of Clorax

1 quart of water

melt all together

keep warm so it don’t harden

while using

—I need some old fashioned remedy and I wonder if this was the first chore of spring cleaning in the barely above freezing days of northern Illinois’ early spring. Aunt Elsie’s tradition of spring cleaning has been lost to me and my contemporaries. If I had a bar of that scratchy naphtha soap that my mother made us wash with—in cold water after running through the poison oak with my brothers—and mixed up the recipe, would I dare to put my sponge in the bucket? To breathe as I lathered my walls? Would it send me straight to the emergency room, my chest aching? Or would it instead pull me up taller, straight as my whitened walls would be, beaming?

Probably, after laving in the Clorox naphtha mix, I would need to prepare another Remedy:

Mrs. Deams recipe for chapped hands

                December 7, 1937

2 oz. glycerine

20 drops of carbolic acid

Use 8 ounce bottle and fill up

with rain water                

The bathing of raw hands in glycerine and rain water would be a soothing luxury. I can see Aunt Elsie rubbing her disinfected and sweet-smelling hands together, her dining room wafting recent rain. She is looking out the front window on to Winslow’s main street. She is waiting for callers; waiting to relish a meal together.