Cleaning Chickens...

 

"You took jobs on a farm while you're in Iowa?" you ask.  Thanks for asking, but... no.

We are visiting my brother-in-law, John, currently.  He was a good male influence on my in my younger years... he taught me to drive (including with a manual transmission); he gave me my first flying lessons when I was 16.  He is a good man, and that, more than anything else, gave me good direction in my formative years.  He and my sister got married when I was 9 years old.  When my sister passed away, Joan and I stayed with John for a couple weeks to get him through the worst of it.

They had a big beautiful home along the Missouri River, and my sister decorated it.  One of the things she enjoyed was collecting blue glassware, including a lot of porcelain chickens and roosters.  When John moved away from that house by the river, he put a good much of that collection above his kitchen cabinets.  A while back, John asked me, "Joan likes to clean, doesn't she?  Do you think she'd like to clean all those glass things."

"Well, first of all, no one likes to clean... but Joan is a voracious cleaner.  But, you can ask her if she'd do that for you, 'cause I'm not going to!"  I think he thought he may have upset me by asking.  I was laughing when I told Joan about it.  Joan doesn't forget.  She brought it up before we got here.

We didn't do it because she likes to clean, we did it as a favor to this special man.  Well, Joan organized the project, she climbed on the ladder (because she is the youngest of us 3) and handed each piece down, John and I washed each piece with soap and hot water, dried them, and handed them back up to Joan.  With each section of cabinet top that she cleared of stuff, she scrubbed the wood up there.  This whole project took several hours.

Should be good for another 12 to 14 years.  ;-)