It was written in pencil. The handwriting was careful and a little shaky. Like someone who hadn’t gone to school very long.
Mrs. Ashford says: The work of keeping a house is the work of keeping a life. Nobody sees it until it stops. But it is never small. It is never nothing. And anyone who does it well deserves to see their children do anything they want.
At the bottom, in the same careful pencil: — written down by Rose Kowalczyk, 1959.
I held that little piece of paper for a long time.
I thought about four hundred and twelve Thursdays. The grout I scrubbed with a toothbrush. The
baseboards. The picture frames lined up with the dust marks. The oven. The sticky drawer and the bar of soap. All the things I did that I thought nobody noticed. All the things I did because I thought that’s just what you did when someone trusted you with their home.
