BoomerGirl Diary

Cleaning the house last week for a family reunion, I found two foil-wrapped chocolate eggs.

I hope they were left from this past Easter, undiscovered by my little nephew and niece, and not the previous Easter.

But you never know when you clean house only when serious company is coming.

In contrast, my mother cleaned house every day: dusting, sweeping, vacuuming, scouring. Her mother cleaned house every day. For women of certain generations, a spotless house was a mark of pride.

You were someone if your home was clean. Now, for most of us, whether there's dust in our corners plays zero role in our self-esteem.

I get lots of e-mail polls, but none that asks the questions I'm curious about:

How many Americans dust every day anymore?

How many sweep their kitchen floors daily?

How often does the average American woman scour her toilet, and how often does the average American man?

My friends, those about my age, clean house when someone they don't know very well is paying a visit. They clean house, in other words, to mislead and impress others.

They do not clean for reasons older generations did: To make their spot on the planet appealing. And, as women, to simply do their duty.

Most surprise visitors to our home would call it clean enough. But yow, when my husband vacuumed our wood floors last week and I pushed the Swiffer behind him, the dirt we picked up astonished us.

Still, our 21st century homes don't get as dirty as homes did 100 years ago.

Cheryl Mendelson, author of "Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House" (Scribner, 1999), which I bought for some reason, says this of the high standards of the 1950s: "Modern supercleanliness represented to" women of that generation "deliverance from the dreary problems that had plagued their mothers' houses: chamber pots, smoke, grease, soot, grime, smells, ashes, bedbugs, fleas, mold and mildew, mud, stained porcelain and fabrics. ... Their excessive cleaning ... was a celebration of their release from centuries of a losing struggle with dirt..."

My daughter-in-law, a full-time career woman, a wife and the mother of a toddler, told me last week that she had bitten the bullet and, after ignoring laundry for weeks, done 20 loads in one day.

Such are the benefits of our times: We own enough clothing to go a long time without washing any. We don't need to slave over a hot stove because we can pay someone else to do it and pick up take-out. We needn't vacuum every day because our furnaces are cleaner, and dust settles between those synthetic fibers, and we don't have to trudge through ash to reach our beds.

So, I should bless the age I live in, and quit feeling guilty that I don't have to - or choose to - work as hard in my home as my mother did in hers.

But I have nothing in which I take such steady pride as Mom took in that dwelling she and Dad shared. And when family is coming to visit, it's Mom's standards that rise up to be met.