RUNNEMEDE REMEMBERED

Growing up in a small town in Southern New Jersey


Sunday, September 28, 2008

Saturday night tradition

I don't know whether I wrote about this before, perhaps I have, but I can't find it if I did.

It was a tradition on Saturday night that mom would make a coffee cake for Sunday breakfast. She would mix up the recipe on the Bisquick box for coffee cake and then bake it. Of course, it was only good while it was hot, but we had this dry, cinnamon-y cake each and every Sunday morning. Apparently my father really enjoyed it and that's why she made it. I personally would have preferred having day-old Kelly's bakery donuts, and I would have walked all the way to Glendora to get them if I had been permitted to do so.

But another tradition of which my sister reminded me was my mom's obsessions with clean floors.

Each and every Saturday night, after most of the children were in bed, she would get down on her hands and knees and scrub every inch of the kitchen floor. Then she would mop it again after the scrubbed floor had been rinsed and dried. She also did this in the bathroom (after all the baths had been taken).

I personally never picked up on the down-on-the-knees, every Saturday night thing. I do have floors that one could eat from, if they were so inclined because they get washed every day -- at least as often as I am phsycially able to do that, which seems to have dropped off recently to every other day. Now, I don't just sweep them (tile floors, I'm talking about), I wash them and then dry them with a clean cloth after they're washed. So, in that respect, I guess I'm copying my mother in the clean floor thing. I just don't scrub them with a scrub brush.

I do use a Mr. Clean Eraser to get in the grooves to get the crud out -- an instrument which was not available in my mom's cleaning days. I have to say, that the Mr. Clean Eraser is one of the best cleaning inventions ever made. It cleans everything from dried on gunk on Corningware casseroles to gunk on the drain in the sink to the stuff that sticks to the stove that you can't get off unless you take off the enamel. Mr. Clean Eraser gets it off without taking off the enamel. What a product.

ttfn

I guess I'm obsessive about clean floors, too.

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