January 5, 2017 – How do you wash the kitchen floor?

          The other day a small photo album fell out onto the floor.  A few years back I sorted pictures so that each little album had the focal person.   This album happened to be my husband with friends, family or golf buddies.   Before I put it back I decided to drop it in his lap for him to peruse while I cooked dinner.

          He reminisced and had to strain his brain to remember the names from years ago.  He got all of the names except one couple.

          “Who are these people?” He asked.

          “The Lasardo’s remember, lived a couple houses down.  Remember, Josephine [our dog] would wander down there and they’d feed her pepperoni.   I always knew where she was by her pepperoni breath.”  I answered

          “Oh, yeah.”  He finally connected the name with the couple.

          “Mrs. Lasardo used to make a pastry every day so that she had a range of pastries to choose from.”  I mentioned and continued on.

          “If you were lucky enough to be invited for coffee, she would bring out a plate of 5 or 6 different cookies or bars.  They were all SOOOO good.” I said as I admired that quality in the small statured Mrs. Lasardo who had rheumatoid arthritis gnarled hands.  I had always wanted to copy her, but my hips would bloom out if I did that.

          “Whatever happened to them?”  He wondered.

          “They moved back to New York to be near their kids as they were getting up there in age.”

          Then I smiled to myself and remembered what Mrs. Lasardo and I had in common.

          Our first house in this county had a brown and tan floor that resembled little stones or cobbles.  How I hated that floor.  It made the kitchen dark, dark cabinets, dark floor.  In the evenings I needed to turn on every light in the kitchen just to see.  And that floor never had a “look clean” look to it.  It always looked dirty and didn’t have a shine.   I like a floor that has a shine so that I can tell it looks clean. [I eventually complained enough that I got a new floor in about 2 years.]

          Couple weeks into moving I am on my hands and knees with my clean bucket of water to rinse and my hot soapy bucket of water to wash, and a bath towel quadrupled folded under my knees.  I was at the stove end of the kitchen and was working my way back.  [As women we can remember every nook and cranny of every house we have ever cleaned – can’t we?]  I get a knock on the door and a ‘holler’ from my neighbor across the street.  “Come in,” I yell, not getting up.

          “Where are you?”  She asks, not seeing me around the corner.

          “In the kitchen.” I say.

          “What are you doing?”  She asks as she saw me down on the floor.

          “Washing the floor.” I answer sitting back on my heels.

          “Ever heard of a mop?” She remarked. She couldn’t imagine I was down on my hands and knees washing the floor.

          I had never used a mop.   This was the way I washed floors for the first 10 years of my marriage and continued to do so for about 15 more years.

          Unknown to me, it was only a matter of a few days that everyone in the neighborhood knew I washed my floor on my hands and knees [like Cinderella did in the story book].   It became a great controversy – but I never changed when I lived in that house.

          It got my floors ultra-clean, it gave me great exercise, it was the way I did things and it worked for me.

Fast forward several years.

          The Lasardo’s moved in – nice older Italian couple.  They moved into the house that had the beautiful weeping cherry in the front lawn that I admired.  Most of my neighbors had already met them.

          “She is just like you, washes her floors on her hands and knees,” said my neighbor who lived along my property line to the east.

          That comment made me smile and took me back a bit.  I hadn’t known that how I wash my floors was such an on-going controversy in the neighborhood.

          I, with my informational neighbor went down to meet them and was introduced.

          My neighbor said, " . . . and she washes her floors on her hands and knees, too.”  I and Mrs. Lasardo were instantly bonded by our “floor washing technique.”