cooking, 

laundry, 

house-cleaning  

These things should be learned by both girls and boys before leaving childhood. 

Nowadays, ‘Domestic Arts’ should also include lawncare and basic home repairs, because taking care of one’s home is a skill-set of its own, and either gender should be able to do certain tasks in the home. 

Everyone needs to learn this, because every middle-grader should know how to clean their room, 

and how to make a sandwich (but not usually at the same time.) 

Middle-graders should know how to wash their clothes and clean a toilet. 

Annnd they should also know how to pick and arrange a bouquet of flowers

and how to hang a picture on their bedroom wall. 

When you become an adult and have a place of your own, you can’t expect anyone to come in and clean for you. 

I am so surprised by females on the internet that take selfies wearing a new outfit, 

with their rooms being such a mess, and yet they expect to receive likes. 

Mature people respect others who take care of what they have, 

     and don’t respect those who don’t take care of what they have. 

If you read and practice what is in this section, you will grow toward being a respectable adult. 

Your chores at home are an apprenticeship for when you have a place of your own.

Now, some mothers and grandmothers might wonder what a man like me could know about housekeeping. 

Well, for a time, I was the second-in-charge-person on cleaning crew of a 250-bed hospital. 

I have personally cleaned: 

regular patient rooms and bathrooms 

isolation rooms for contagious patients 

bloody emergency treatment rooms 

gooey maternity delivery rooms 

operating rooms.

I have vacuumed football fields-worth of carpet, 

done much carpet cleaning, 

institutional floor stripping and floor waxing, 

and cleaned many 2-6 stall public restrooms, both male and female, many times. 

Plus, I helped raise three children with their bouts of mud puddle-antics, projectile vomiting and shotgun diarrhea. 

So yeah, I feel like I can guide a middle-grader on the basics of cleaning a home.

What is in the photo? Well, my wife had 3 surgeries in 6 months, (2020-2021) and was her caregiver for several months after, 

While doing laundry, I saved the dryer lint, to show that there are A LOT of places around the house that need cleaned regularly. 

(FYI: I cleaned the lint filter every other load. The pen is for scale.)  I could knit a pair of socks with all that lint, eh?

Eric J. Rose

middlegrademysteries.com

photo: EJR