After winning contest, I'll have it 'maid' in the shade

I've always aspired to having a clean house, a really clean house, but living with slobs most of my life hasn't helped my cause. Now I may have stumbled upon a way to actually get the dream clean I've been longing for.

Weiman Products is sponsoring a "Maid for a Year" contest that will reward winners with the best essays with free housekeeping services for a year. This is the kind of contest I can get excited about.

Imagine - a dust-free dining room, clutterless countertops, immaculate floors.

Frankly, I've never thought that having a housekeeper was a high-enough priority to spend money on. When the kids were younger and I really needed some extra help around the house, we couldn't afford a maid. I can't tell you the number of times I closed the door behind me in the morning with dirty dishes still in the sink and the house in complete disarray.

Now I probably could afford to shell out the cash for a housekeeper, since the kids are raised and gone, but there's something in my blue-collar Midwest background that just won't let me. Among my family and my husband's family, it would be considered a sign of weakness to admit you can't keep your own house clean.

But if I could get a maid for free, now there's a different story.

All I have to do is write a 250-word piece about what the feeling of clean means to me and why I deserve maid service. Piece of cake.

Let me expound on why I deserve maid service.

When I was a youngster and the only girl among four siblings, it fell upon me to help Mom clean the house (boys helped outside; girls inside in those days). The absolute worst task was cleaning my grandfather's quarters. He chewed Copenhagen snuff, complete with a spittoon alongside his rocking chair.

If that whole spittoon situation wasn't bad enough, he had an old-style flat-bottomed large kitchen sink that sometimes doubled for a spittoon. I won't go into details. It was downright nasty, but nothing a half can of Comet couldn't scrub away.

I have paid my cleaning duties in, oh, so many ways.

I worked for two summers at a family-owned hotel in Salzburg, Austria, where I cleaned up the kitchen by myself almost every night without the benefit of a commercial dishwasher. The job also included ironing endless amounts of bedsheets in a dungeon-like basement and shoveling gravel to revamp the hotel's backyard patio.

Later in life, when we moved to Whitefish in 1991, I got stuck with all the cleaning when we sold our home and hobby farm. My husband already had started his job in the Flathead and I stayed behind to tie up the loose ends.

One of those loose ends was gathering up about two dozen cow skulls scattered about our pastures in various forms of decomposition. My husband the meat processor had this idea of bleaching the skulls from cattle he slaughtered and selling them for Western wall-hangings. But the people who bought our farm didn't want the skulls hanging around, so I gathered up the maggot-invested heads and hauled them to the dump.

Are you beginning to get the picture here? I've been saddled with more than my fair share of cleaning.

My husband would be content to let dirty socks pile up until the sock drawer is empty. I didn't see the floors of my daughters' bedrooms for years, it seemed, because they were carpeted with discarded clothing and shoes.

I deserve a break, so please "Maid for a Year" contest, pick me. There's no one more worthy of free maid service than me.

The ancient proverb says that cleanliness is indeed next to Godliness. I'd like a chance to feel heavenly about my house.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com