Chapter 8 of The I Hate to Housekeep Book, “The Rest of the Pea Patch,” addresses some pretty mundane matters, but it has some of the best lines in the whole book, and a few really good pieces of advice. Oddly, I come to it after a moment of great domestic minginess. Today is a dark day — it looks like it’s going to rain soon — and I’ve spent the morning waiting for a large delivery of groceries, receiving it, and then putting the groceries away. Needless to say, despite ordering $160 worth of stuff, I forgot to order a large jar of mayonnaise and I also forgot cottage cheese and eggs, so I’ll be heading out to the store this afternoon anyhow. On the bright side, though, all the canned goods were delivered, and those are the things I hate carrying the most. One conserves energy where one can. 

Having received said delivery and put it away, I thought the thing to do was go upstairs and tackle Chapter 8, here, but on getting to the top of the stairs, I noticed I’d left the hall light on downstairs. Though I didn’t feel like trotting back down — I’d set up my workspace, I was ready to go — I thought, “No, I’ll feel guilty if I leave that light on. I’m wasting energy. Even if it’s JUST ONE LIGHTBULB.” So I went down, flicked the switch, and came back upstairs feeling very virtuous. And sitting down with Chapter 8, I see that I was being a very good girl indeed: Mrs. Bracken would approve. Chapter 8, you see, is, in large part, about saving on your electric bill.
Peg Bracken is a big fan of knowing what you’re spending on things that seem like little things but surely do add up. There’s much talk of kilowatts and fuse boxes and having a man show you how to do this or that, and having a man call the electric company when you have a problem, because men get taken more seriously over the phone. I don’t dispute any of this, personally, but there’s no question it could be a bit of a turn-off to the more adamant of the feminists who’d pick this book up today. Regardless, for those of you who want to pay attention to energy consumption, there’s probably a good deal of validity found here, though of course appliances and our notions of energy-efficiency have evolved dramatically in the last fifty years.

There’s one tip in this chapter — and when you get down to it, Chapter 8 does seem a bit random in its selections — that I’ve always meant to take on, but have never done, which is that every room in the house should have a Useful Box. In my own case, I think every room would be a bit excessive, but you basically have to take her point. Bracken’s useful box is an old cigar box, or tin, or shoebox, in which you keep the following items: a pair of scissors; a roll of cellophane tape; a pencil; a ballpoint pen; a notepad; spools of thread in black, white and beige, each with a needle (ok, I’d skip that one, personally); and a nail file (GOD yes, an emery board SHOULD be in EVERY ROOM in the house).

The point of the Useful Box is, obviously, that these are things one always needs, and at the moment one needs them, one shouldn’t have to trot downstairs or upstairs or to anywhere, really, more than three paces, to get to them. We keep our fingernail clippers in the bathroom, which makes sense, for the most part. Except, the place I am, 95% of the time, when I need a nail clipper, is in the kitchen. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to figure this out, but a few months ago I began to keep a nail clipper (and an emery board) in the box on the kitchen table where I keep postage stamps and spare keys. Now, when I need to trim a nail that I’ve messed up while cooking, I can do it without leaving the kitchen. I felt like a genius, when I figured out that I could do this. I mean, no one’s stopping me from spending $2.50 on another nail clipper; and I can keep it wherever I want! It’s small; it’s not bothering anyone. But it saves me a lot of time and effort, having the clipper right there. So, bully for me. I am sure Bracken would approve.

Bracken points out that the Useful Box is even good to have in the bathroom, and I have to agree. Some day, when I am a good person, I will arrange for a Useful Box to live in the bathroom. I do have a roll of Scotch tape in there, and a pair of scissors; but the scissors are the ones I use to cut my daughter’s hair, and I probably shouldn’t use them for more heavy-duty messy jobs. Similarly, in the bathroom’s useful box, if I were really good, I’d keep a really long pair of tweezers, because they are useful for fishing things out of the drain, like disgusting clogs of hair which we should really be grateful for, because they trapped the nice earring that I just dropped down the drain. Don’t ask me how I know this, by the way, just take my word for it.

There is a very long section in here on the matter of ashtrays, which would have been a pressing domestic concern in Bracken’s era, but is no more, since pretty much no one smokes anymore. At least, no one smokes inside the house. I have attended more than one PTA-based party and noticed small covens of guests huddled outside on the back deck smoking cigarettes, but I’ve never seen anyone openly smoking indoors. The day of the ashtray has come and gone. It’s a shame for the fans of mid-century modern design, because some of those ashtrays were pretty cool looking items, though I’m more of an Art Deco person, myself. I wonder if people will start to collect ashtrays again but use them for something different, like holding their jewelry or as candy dishes or something. Except I don’t know anyone who keeps candy dishes around, what with people caring about diets and stuff like that. On the other hand, people do smoke pot legally these days. Maybe the shelter magazines have articles about Bringing Back the Ashtrays. I wouldn’t know, since I don’t read shelter magazines, but if anyone reading this has links they want to share, feel free.

Speaking of ashtrays: The last paragraphs of Chapter 8 advise us on what to do with our fireplace in the seasons when we’re not using it. (The fireplace is, of course, really nothing more than a very, very large ashtray. The issue, of course, is that while you can always just wash an ashtray and put it away, you can’t just wash and put away your fireplace.)
I get that fireplaces are seldom the most fascinating things to behold, when there’s no fire burning in them (and even then, I don’t find them that interesting, though I do find them a source of angst, because I worry about the house burning down). Our current residence has a fireplace, and it gets used maybe five times a year, but I really don’t spend any time wondering, “how can I figure out how to make that gaping hole look better between April and November every year?” If I decided to get artsy about making the empty fireplace look nice, my husband would probably think I was off my rocker and trying to kill us all. So I don’t worry about the fireplace. Frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time, like perfecting rugelach.

I am not sure when the phrase “taking a mental health day” entered the American vernacular but I am sure of one thing, which is that Peg Bracken absolutely knew what a mental health day was. She didn’t call it that. But she devoted an entire chapter to The I Hate to Housekeep Book  to this concept, and furthermore, offered wise suggestions as to how to get through a grim, horrid day when one has no choice, when taking a mental health day is simply not an option.

I know for a fact that there are days when I basically can’t deal with the house I live in, or the other house I’m supposed to take care of (I am a landlord, and am therefore in charge of more than my fair share of furnaces, sinks, hot water heaters, and other mechanical things that can break). There are days when I think, “wouldn’t it be nice to own three different vacuum cleaners so that I wouldn’t have to lug my one good vacuum cleaner from floor to floor of the house? I might vacuum more, if I didn’t have to carry a vacuum cleaner up the stairs and down the stairs.” (This is, of course, total bullshit, I would still not vacuum the house as often as I ought to.) Today I was supposed to go do Good Works downtown. It is a cruddy, cold, rainy day today — the kind of weather I actually quite like, as long as I don’t have to do anything more than take my child to school and then take her home from school — and I was slated to do Good Works, but then something came up. Now I have to wait for a plumber to show up at one of the rental apartments to fix a kitchen sink sprayer that apparently has gone all Beetlejuice on the lovely tenants. (They’re being very good-humored about it, but really, it needs to get fixed.) Because this is the kind of thing where I am awaiting a phone call and will then have to drop whatever I’m doing to rush to the other house, I’m not doing Good Works. I’m also not vacuuming. I’m also not washing the floors here, because it’s a cruddy day outside, which means there’s no point: the moment the floor dried, it would be covered in wet leaves and footprints anyhow. I have made a few important mental calculations: I do have a vague sense of what we’re having for dinner tonight, no small thing. But I’ve not done laundry (there is some to do, but not enough to make up a proper load); I’ve not cleaned any bathrooms; I’ve not taken out the recycling. (I will do that, when I leave the house to go meet the plumber, I swear.)

If I thought I had more time, I would take one of Bracken’s perfectly reasonable suggestions, which go in two possible directions. There’s the “I cannot take one more step, and I am retreating to my cell, and you all can go screw yourselves for the next 24 hours” version, and the “ok, if I don’t do something, the world really will fall apart, so I have to get something done, let’s GET SOMETHING DONE.” The “cannot take one more step” version involves things like: climb into bed with your manicure kit and reading material of choice and refuse to leave until you feel recharged the next day. (This is great, but usually impossible, and, seriously, for me, one day would not suffice.)

The second option, which, Bracken points out, is usually the one available to the housewife, is to first think despondently about the lucky people who aren’t housewives but who go out to Jobs and Do Things in the Big World. Then, you must take some deep breaths (she says this in a non-Yoga Journal way, but in a more sassy, Celeste Holm kind of way), and face the fact that to everything there is a season, and your season may not yet have come, but that there is time yet, and in the meantime, you will, yes, face these unpleasant tasks, and do them. She observes that Freud always said he did his best work in a condition of moderate misery. Not that we’d really want to hold Freud up as a great model of anything in particular.  But I think we can take her point.

So then the problem becomes, How do you motivate yourself to get this crap done. For example, the writing of thank-you notes. Possibly in your life you don’t write thank-you notes ever; if so, bully for you. In my life, I often have to write thank-you notes, and what’s more, I do it. There are a number of ways to force oneself to sit down and do this task, which isn’t particularly onerous but is quite time-consuming if you’re doing it well. Here is Bracken’s take on how to tackle this list of small tasks:

“Let us say you feel it’s important, for some reason, that tomorrow you make five dozen cookies for the Bluebirds, wash and iron the bedroom curtains [good god, at least I’ve never done that], write a long chatty letter to the family, and shorten a skirt, which is a frolicsome Monday for you, but there it is.”

The efficiency experts, Bracken says, would tell you to start by making a list. But that might slow you down. The random housewife will not be encouraged by list making. What the random housewife will do is make the list and go, “Well! There you have it! I made the list!” and then that will be the end of it. No: what you must do is start all of these things but not finish them, like so: you stamp and address an envelope for the chatty letter, and write the opening paragraph, and then stop;

then you organize the dry ingredients for the cookies and stop (I’d take the eggs out of the fridge, too, to give them time to get to room temperature — butter, too);

you take the curtains off the rod and throw them on the floor, and then set up the sewing machine for fixing up the skirt, and then the ironing board, and stop.

Now what do you have? You have a situation where you’ve GOT to deal with everything you started. And as long as you’ve got three or four hours ahead of you with no small children around, you should be able to tackle all of this. You would throw the curtains into the washing machine and turn it on; you’d get the cooky dough set up; while the cookies baked, you could write your letter to those cousins, while you sit at the kitchen table, so that it’s easy for you to jump up and turn the trays around; and while the cookies cooled, you could get the curtains dried and mended and ironed, or whatever the hell you had to do to the curtains. I don’t know if people actually launder their curtains, I’ve never laundered a curtain in my life. I’ve certainly  never ironed a curtain.
No, wait. I take it back. At our last apartment, I did have little curtains in the kitchen windows that I did launder from time to time, because they did show dirt. But in ten years of having those curtains, I think they were laundered three times. This really wasn’t something that nagged at me, and god knows I didn’t iron them. So. I stand corrected, but only a little bit.

Anyhow: at the end of the three or four hours, the cookies will be cooling on racks by the window, the curtains will be taken care of, the letter will be written, and, ok, I don’t know what to do about the skirt, but presumably you’ve managed to get that taken care of, too. Is hemming a skirt hard? Damned if I know. But even if you haven’t finished every single item on the to-do list, you’ve definitely got the majority of them licked, which is impressive. In fact, it means (if you ask me) that you’ve earned the right to throw yourself on the couch with the magazine of your choice and have some cookies (screw the Bluebirds, they won’t notice if a few cookies are missing from the foil-lined shoebox of cookies) and relax for ten minutes before you pick the kids up at school

****

In the case of my day, I got the phone call from the plumber at 1.25 and ran to meet him at the rental. The problem with the sink took about 45 minutes to fix — not a big deal, we got lucky – and I managed to have some time after that was taken care and before I had to pick my daughter up at school. I wrote an email to the tenants explaining that their problem was, we hope, solved, and that everything else seems fine. I wrote email to other people in an attempt to clarify or solve Good Works-related problems. I was, basically, productive in a small way, not a visible way (the floor is still covered with cat hair, crumbs, and little bits of random crud), but in ways that had to happen. I picked up my daughter at school, brought her home, gave her a snack, and proceeded to make a fine dinner. The day ended and we all tumbled into bed weary and listening to the rain pounding.
But when we woke up today, the sun was shining. And I’m on my way to do Good Works in person. Maybe next Monday I will take a mental health day. (Who am I kidding.)

A good mother and housewife, in the circles I run in, isn’t so likely to use Fantastik to clean her kitchen counters, the way she was in the 1970s. These days, we’re supposed to use natural, organic housecleaning agents: bottles of Method and Mrs. Meyer’s and Seventh Generation abound. These things often come in very attractive packaging, and might even smell nice (which Windex and Fantastik do not, in my opinion). None of them are cheap, not even if you score them with a coupon while they’re on sale. But if you poke a random mother at the playground in my neighborhood, and ask her what she uses to clean her house, she’ll say “vinegar and baking soda.” “Frugal,” “organic,” “natural,” “non-toxic,” “homemade cleaners,” those are the keywords these types live by, and I should know, because I am one of them. In my case, it all got started because I was reading Peg Bracken from an early age. And I was cheap. Then, in the era of the mommyblogger (which I obviously am, not that I’m proud of it, but oh well), a number of sub-groups began to embrace this kind of thing. These were women who prided themselves on being more organic than thou, or holier, or crunchier, or less toxic; they were stay at home mothers trying to be frugal. And they tended to write as if this cleaning with baking soda and vinegar thing was new, and a total stroke of genius. Well, they were partly right.
Peg Bracken knew from vinegar and baking soda. This “frugal housecleaning” isn’t a new phenomenon. These aren’t cleaning supplies that were discovered by the neo-hippies of the 1990s or the oughties. Aunt Lucy knew about them, so Bracken knew about them, and Bracken wrote about them in most amusing fashion. Fortunately for you and me, Bracken was, in the 1960s (pre-hippiedom) more realistic about these things than either Aunt Lucy or the wholesome types (1960s or current remix version) would be about it. “Let us be candid,” she writes, “about a few pantry items and what they’re good for. The fact is, few of them do as good a job, as neatly or quickly, as things you can buy.” Bracken’s Chapter 7, wherein Bracken explains which of these old-timey household tips are really worth pursuing, is matter-of-fact and cut-to-the-chase. There’s penny pinching, and there’s time, and there’s effort, and you have to be practical about how much of each you want to spend on any given task. Additionally, there are tips that aren’t about saving money or cleaning more efficiently, but are simply about making life in a broader sense somewhat easier and/or more affordable. “Beware,” Bracken writes, “of buying many disposable items, like paper towels. It’s cheaper to use terrycloth hand towels in the kitchen. If you feel you MUST have a paper-towel rack, put it near the stove. Then the towels will be used for draining things instead of wiping hands, and they’ll last longer.” Hear, hear. A cheapskate move, and a “green” one at that. It’s like the dishrag/sponge thing we talked about earlier. I go through maybe one roll of paper towels in a year. I use paper towels for cleaning up puke and draining fat off things I’m cooking. That’s about it. Since the residents of our house seldom have gastrointestinal woes, and I don’t make meatloaf on a daily basis, it means that a six pack of paper towels can last us a ridiculously long time. The package actually collects dust, down there in the basement. So Bracken’s right: as long as you’re someone who’s doing laundry on a reasonable basis, there’s not much good reason to invest heavily in paper towels. (Maybe this wouldn’t hold if you had a household with ten children in it, but for my small family, it works out just fine.)

Am I supposed to dust the package of paper towels?
I’m not going to answer that.

Anyone who’s ever looked at a listsicle of Life Hacks or Kitchen Hacks will read Bracken and smack their hands to their heads feeling stupid. People claim to have their minds blown by Life Hacks, but so many of these concepts were already laid out (without references to iPhones and far less in the way of binder clips) in Bracken. So many hacks are straight out of Bracken (or Hints from Heloise, or whatever household manual of the 1960s). I can’t tell you the number of times friends have sent me links to Life Hack lists and I’ve looked at them and said, “yeah, number 6? That’s Peg Bracken right there.” Cleaning with pantry items is just the start. I remember one list, which I now cannot locate, that had 100 Life Hacks, and when I went back and looked at  the list and Peg Bracken’s household tips from the I Hate to Cook Book, the overlap was something like 30%. Yeah, those Life Hacks. Revolutionary stuff.

Late last night a friend who is working on her wedding registry posted a desperate cry on Facebook. She was looking into towels and paralyzed with fear regarding bath towels (and hand towels and washcloths): should they be white, or could she indulge in the fancy colored towels of her dreams? She seemed to feel that there would be regrets either way; but, Which regret was preferable over the other?
She had, last I checked, a couple dozen responses to her query, and many of them struck me as sensible, and some of them struck me as crazy. I quickly grasped that I am someone who has strong feelings on the matter of bath linens (wow, what a shocker), and because I know this person well enough to know that we are often aligned in our feelings regarding household matters, I decided to send her a message. Publicly, I posted a comment saying that I maintain a white towel household, but not for reasons that are as simple as “because you can bleach the towels” or “because I like a boring bathroom.” I said, “It’s very late, I’m too tired to explain my position on this, but this is how I feel about it and I feel strongly about it. I am capable of writing an entire essay on the subject.” A few moments later, I sent her a private message explaining a few key points. But because I got it into my head that I could write an essay on this — much as I wrote an essay on dishtowels — I am going to sit down and explain why the white bath linens are inevitably preferable to the colored ones, no matter how gorgeous the colors are.

This is going to be a long piece of text.

The Basic Rules of Towels:
1. 100% cotton. No polyester content, ever, not even on trim. 2. Launder in hot water. Never use softeners or dryer sheets. Any towel that won’t feel good without those things is a towel not worth owning. 3. You should always be able to bleach towels because it’s an imperfect world, and there will be times when it is for hygiene reasons necessary to bleach towels. 4. If you have white towels, you never have to worry about things matching. There is no color of towel that is available now that will be available in five years, when you realize you need to get more washcloths. You will wind up with mismatched towels. You will be annoyed. 6. Bath sheets are silly unless you have access, in your house, to industrial laundering facilities. They take forever to dry, which means that, no matter how luxurious they seem when you first buy them, they will wind up smelling of mildew faster than any other towel in your house. 7. If you have children in the house, you will need more washcloths and hand towels than you would ever imagine. 8. If you’re buying a towel by feel, remember that no matter what the towel feels like in the store, it will almost certainly not feel that way after you’ve laundered it. Fabrics always come with some kind of treatment on them, so they feel soft and awesome in the store while they’re on display. That stuff, which is called sizing, washes away. So it has no bearing on what you’ll be dealing with a year from now.

If you live alone, presumably it’s possible to invest in colored towels and keep them going for a long time and be careful about laundering and have gorgeous colored towels ten years after the initial investment. However, I do not live alone; I live in a household with two people who are not particularly filthy or slobby, and even so, I know for a fact that maintaining a perfect set of colored towels in this house would be a nightmare.

My mother will remember, I think, that our towels when I was growing up were often wonderful colors, but that nothing matched. The towels were mostly Fieldcrest Royal Velvet towels, and very high quality; wonderful towels. I still have one of them, somewhere; it is a dark teal blue. But no two towels matched. There was a phase when we had mostly wheat-colored towels; that was a depressing phase. Nothing good is wheat-colored, I feel, except wheat. Or, I guess, bread. I mean, no home furnishing should be wheat-colored.
For a while I was weak and when I had to buy towels I fell victim to the beauty of colored towels. Probably  this is because I always lived in rental apartments where I had no control over the bathroom decor except for the towels and, sometimes, the shower curtain. It seemed reasonable that I should be able to pick the color of something. But even so: would it match whatever the bathroom already looked like? I had a pale blue bathroom for four years; I don’t like pale blue! I must have simply tried to put the colors out of my head, knowing that I wouldn’t live in that apartment forever. And I didn’t: in 2002, I took control over the matter. We were about to renovate the bathroom in the first house we’d bought, and I had plans. We would re-do the bathroom; the walls would be painted some smashing color, and the towels would be white. Because — here is another virtue of white towels — you never have to worry about them not matching the paint in the bathroom. When you buy towels to match your room, you’re guaranteeing that either you will get heartily sick of that color, or that when you have to buy more towels in that color, you cannot any longer, and you will, out of dire need for towels, wind up with towels that don’t QUITE match the walls, and you will be SAD.

So we had our beautiful new bathroom, which we’d done with black and white tile, and the walls were painted Kermit-the-Frog green. Our lovely white towels were perfect. I never worried about them looking weird hanging on the wall; I folded them neatly and hung them on the towel rods, and it looked perfect. Green towels would have faded away against the wall — and then faded, after so much laundering, and looked depressing. But the white towels are always cheerful.
Some people think white towels look antiseptic and institutional; some people think white towels are relaxing, spa-like. I think that it’s a matter of color and quality. If you have white towels that don’t look wilted, and aren’t shredded at the edges, you will find them pleasant to use. So wash the towels frequently; use bleach when needed; use OxyClean or bluing regularly; don’t let the towels molder on the bathroom floor or use them to mop up the fluoride rinse when your husband spills it. They will remain white for a good long time. And you will not be sad when you look at them, freshly laundered and neatly hung on your towel racks. They will look handsome and comforting, folded neatly in the linen closet. Kind of like this. I mean, my linen closet isn’t anything to write home about — whoever designed it was clearly addicted to cocaine and not someone whose linen closet was a personal high priority — but it is orderly, and when I want a towel, there it is, clean and neatly folded.