Today I Noticed...Cleaning

I noticed something as I was going about my business today and I thought my grandmothers are probably just shaking their heads. I cannot even imagine what my great-grandmothers might be thinking of the life I lead.

I was doing some cleaning today. I had a load of laundry drying in our automatic clothes dryer. There was another load of laundry sloshing around in our automatic washer getting clean without my attendance. I just tossed the clothes into the machines and pressed the buttons and the work of cleaning began.

The robotic vacuum cleaner was rolling across the den floor sweeping up the bits from the trees that we had tracked in and strewn across the floor. I had cleaned out the dust bin of Rosey Jetson and attached a new filter. Then, as I sat sipping a cup of tea, I opened the app on my phone and instructed Rosey Jetson, the robotic vacuum cleaner to sweep the den floor. 

adapted from this source

I had just finished cleaning out the fridge and disposing of outdated salad dressing and ketchup. I also tossed out the unrecognizable food that had been tucked away in there a week or so ago but let go to waste because we never got a yen to clean out that leftover bit and eat it. There were a few little sealed containers with mushy something and something suspicious growing like a science experiment on the corner of another. I can just hear Muffa, my paternal grandmother, exclaim with disdain about how wasteful we are as I was scraping those bits into the trash.  

I was unloading the dishwasher so that I could reload it with containers where I had cleaned out the spoiled and wasted food and paused to pour myself another cup of tea before I sat down to rest my back. I felt pretty productive, though, as I opened the app on my phone and instructed the oven to begin a clean cycle to get that black crunchiness off the oven floor where the strawberry bread I'd baked had bubbled over yesterday afternoon. You see, I had forgotten about the dribbled over mess in there and when Mike had baked biscuits to go with the ham we had for breakfast, smoke had curled out into the kitchen and smelled it up until he had turned on the exhaust fan above the cooktop to clear that away and in just a little while, the inside of the oven will be sparkling clean again and I will get a notification on my phone that the cleaning is done.

I realized that the laundry will be ready to swap out again - I will fold the dry load and transfer the wet load to the dryer and start the next load to wash. So, I am sitting here sipping my cup of tea and browsing through an online post that has a how-to instructing me how to transform something to give it a new look or purpose while there is a soft tune playing in the background from Alexa, my virtual assistant. 

I know that Granny, my maternal grandmother, is probably smiling and shaking her head in comparing how my cleaning is so different from hers back in the day. She would have embraced the robotic vacuum and all the gadgets just as I do but she would also sit us down and tell us tales about how things were when she was a young woman and those chores would have a whole different look. She would tell us about drawing water from the well and heating it and scrubbing and the back-breaking labor it took to get things cleaned.

Earlier in the week the house-wash-guy came and used a power washer with a generator and blasted all sorts of suds and rinses to get the mold and mildew off the siding and make it new and shiny, just like a fresh paint job that my ancestors would have swiped across their siding as a way to freshen it up, taking hours or days to cover it all out in the hot sun. 

As I sit here capturing these thoughts and memories, I think of how different it must have been for my great-grandmothers and grandmothers and remember my own mother scrubbing, sweeping, and painting to give things a nice fresh spring cleaning and I am so thankful for the luxurious life I am fortunate to lead. I also wonder what is in store for my grandchildren in years to come. Will they have something even more advanced than the Robots from the Jetson's cartoon that I enjoyed?