Home Comforts

Cheryl Mendelson is my hero. She's a wife, a mother, a Havard-educated lawyer, a successful novelist, and ... a self-professed lover of housekeeping. Her first book was not the fiction she is known for but a tome on housekeeping entitled Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House. You might recognize her name because she wrote one of my favorite new books, Love, Work, Children. By chance, I found out that she had also written the housekeeping bible that I had stumbled across at my mother's back in December. Back then, I skipped the intro in my zeal to get to the meat of the housekeeping instruction. While my young son slept, I would thumb through the large, dusty book, stopping to read a very paragraphs about polishing silver and moving on to find even more scintillating words in the chapter on bedding.

Had I read the introduction, I would have realized that the author shares my same love of keeping house, and has also struggled for years to make sense of her equally deep belief in the importance of taking advantage of the strides made by those great feminists before us. So, there she is, lawyer, novelist, and professor, who somehow finds time to do the wash each week, air out her mattress and pillows, and press the napkins. I could never keep up with the list of housekeeping duties she mentions in the first few chapters, but I like knowing that someone else out there thinks that this work is important. And it makes me feel normal for having created and used a chore chart to keep track of the weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks needed to keep our home clean and orderly.

While I haven't read the whole book - it's nearly 900 pages long - I intend to do so as I find myself needing to comfort of it's pages of home lore. And I highly recommend this book to anyone setting up a home for the first time. It's important to have a place to go to ask questions like: Does the fork go on the right or the left? Does flour go in the pantry or refrigerator? How do I get grease stains out of linen? I think of Home Comforts as a housekeeping bible or sorts. Just as there are those out there who take the Bible seriously and have read it from cover to cover, there are others who keep it around because they know it's going to come in handy one day when they need some guidance.