Monday she rolled the great washing machine from the shed to the kitchen, opening up the set tubs and grinding the week’s clothing through the wringer, water boiling on the Glenwood and Kate’s face red and shiny until sheets and shirts hung flapping on the clothesline secured by gray clothespins. Tuesday she ironed, using a sequence of flatirons that heated on the Glenwood’s hottest places. She picked them up in turn by a universal wooden handle, and returned each for reheating when she exhausted its usable heat. Wednesday baking? Say Wednesday and Saturday baking, when my mother was a girl, twenty loaves of bread a week (but later you could buy soft bread already sliced in greased paper, that never went stale—white airy bread, a wonder as they called it) and pies by the half-dozen: rhubarb in spring; apple much of the year, pumpkin and mince; strawberry briefly and blueberry always (from canning): pies on the table three meals a day. Every day she cooked with salt pork from the cairn in the cellar, and with homegrown maple syrup and honey, and with vinegar kept in the cellar where she descended for her Ball jars. In summer she sat on the porch snapping Kentucky Wonders, bushels at a time, to cook up with onions, milk, and salt pork or to put into four hundred jars; or she sat on the porch shelling peas, dense green shot thudding like hail into the aluminum kettle. When my mother and her sister were girls, the family of five enlarged with hired men at harvest. After supper Wesley and maybe a hired man would pick bushels of beans or tomatoes or berries, and Kate would sit on the porch with her daughters shelling peas or culling berries or shucking corn for tomorrow’s canning or jam-making, and for tomorrow’s dinner.

When cooking or preparing paused a little, before the evening of darning or repairs, Kate made clothes, tissue-paper patterns set on the dining-room table cleared of bread, pies, vinegar, syrup, and salt; then the chick-chick-chickle of the treadle-operated sewing machine—there are three in the attic—as Kate sewed dresses and aprons, fancy and plain, coats and blouses and skirts. And she cleaned house, regularly each week and twice a year in special, hauling quilts and mattresses and a dozen hooked rugs outside for shaking and spanking. She emptied chamber pots, killed insects, and set mousetraps. Cats lived in the barn—animals outside; people inside—though now and again, when rodent infestation became intolerable, one cat gained temporary inside patrol duty. To clean the floors she used mops and brooms, no vacuum cleaner; she dusted, she waxed, and she ended every day by washing the precious hardwood floor of her kitchen. The floors of the other rooms were wide soft pine protected by rugs. The proud hardwood floor of the kitchen darkened every night with Kate’s mopping.