Sunday mornings…

Well, it’s another Sunday morning. Just me sitting here thinking. I have two things to go over that tie together so hang in there with me, ok? Growing up I remember my Mom, every Sunday like clock work would put on a stack of country records on the record player and thoroughly clean the house. Not that the house was ever messy. When we were  little kids she had those “runners” that everyone used to had to have going through the house. If you are unfamiliar with “runners”, good for you since they had little hard plastic spikes that held them down to the carpet and if you ran your foot up underneath one of them it hurt like hell. But basically they where plastic strips that covered high traffic areas of the house to save the wear and tear on the carpet. We lived in a shotgun house on Second street (531 to be exact) and back to my story, our Mom would clean on Sundays’. She too, I am sure like every other adult had furniture no one was allowed to sit on either. She also had hand towels in the bathroom that were just for “show”. We couldn’t touch them either. Later on in life she had an expensive couch that her brother had given her that sat in the main living room. We weren’t allowed to sit on it either though we did we she wasn’t looking but I will get back to the couch in a few. So here I am as an adult. Mom is long gone to her reward and it’s Sunday. What am I thinking about?What she used to do. It was so important for her to have the house spotless. I tend to listen to old traditional country music like she did on Sundays and reminisce. I don’t miss a lot things growing up, well some I do some I don’t but I won’t go in to that now. And well, I also tend to way over think some things but I was just reflecting that all that hard work she put into the house and how she wanted it spotless and we couldn’t touch certain things like couches and hand towels and what happened in the end? The house is gone… Long gone too..Torn down to make a few more parking spaces for the Holy Name church. I stopped by the day a guy was stripping out the white brick fire place in the dining room as the house was being slowly dismantled and my memories were being taken away from me. We never used the fireplace but we had a warm morning gas heater in front of it. I used to run in there in the morning to keep my feet warm. I also hung out there after  a long day of playing in the snow. I would pull up a chair and put my feet on the top of the heater to get warm. It’s all gone now though. The heater, the pear tree and Her relentless Sundays’ spent fighting dirt and for what? A few days ago, I found a log book at work. It was from around 1999. It was for a small treatment plant in Pleasant view subdivision we had to take care of since the original owners had turned it over to us.We have to keep a diligent daily log of work in detail. This log book was from 1999 to around 2001 when the plant was closed and bull dozed over. .. I looked through it. I hadn’t seen it since it was “written”. I saw where I had kept details of what happened on a daily basis. How operations went, who was there, whether it was raining or not. Things like that. Every day was noted with the time, my name, lab results, plant conditions etc. And for what? The book is now irreverent like most things we as adults do. My mom dedicating her Sundays’ to house cleaning. Me keeping records in a log book that no one will ever look at. The plant is long gone the State is no longer interested in the records but I did it diligently too. Just like Mom did when she housed cleaned. The log book will eventually find its way into a trash can to buried in heaps of garbage like a lot of deligent things we do. It’s busy work. But it’s work. My mom never built any monuments, Her cleaning house has left me with fond memories. A house filled with music. Sure, we clean here too and keep it clean. But in the big picture. One day the house will be torn down and we will be long gone too. What did we leave behind? A worthless log book with old dates and tests results in it or did we contribute to the bigger picture? Mom never knew that her sundays would become my Sundays. even if that white couch her brother gave her that we couldn’t sit on eventually burnt up in the house fire…