I also just finished reading "The Help," the book that takes place in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963, a landmark year for racism in America. In the book, the maids gingerly and anonymously reveal their personal information what it was like to work for privileged white people, cooking, cleaning and tending to their children. A big portion of the book is devoted to cleaning as the loner tall gawky white girl who graduated from Ole Miss without landing herself a husband gets a job writing a cleaning column for the local newspaper. What does she know of cleaning, her lily white hands having never touched a rag? She cribs the information from a maid, of course (and shares her paycheck w/her).
These maids cleaned even the tiniest houses every day. They cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. It occurs to me that I, too, could clean my house every day and still never be finished. Today I wiped Venetian blinds, mopped two floors, ran a rag around the bathroom porcelain and dug dirt out of the crevices of two sets of stairs. The trouble with cleaning is the more you look, the more dirt you see. I used to paint over things rather than clean them. I think I'll go paint some of that ratty old furniture now.
