Heloïse, Yes. Martha, No
Tue., April 16, 04:52 PM
Now that we’ve learned not to be obsessed with housekeeping, there is no longer the overabundance of household hint advice in the newspapers as well as in the other media. There is, on the other hand, a web site called “I’m Not Martha.”
Nobody much remembers Heloïse, who was the champion of them all. After she died, her daughter, who had occasionally contributed as Heloïse II, took over the daily column, but the spirit was gone. (Maybe one needs the mind-set of having to do without.) One by one the newspapers stopped carrying it. Heloïse is still around, but I don’t know whether she's still writing that column.
Martha Stewart wants you to buy stuff. Heloïse’s hints were often ways to substitute what you have instead of spending money. As a Navy wife during the forties, she shared housekeeping shortcuts and invited others to share as well.
Some of those tricks were unquestionably weird, limited to only a few users. (Did you hear about the guy – of course it’s a guy – who tucked his socks into the glasses in the dishwasher? As if that weren’t enough, he then drank out of those same glasses!) On the other hand, some were terrific. Last Sunday’s Martha Stewart column answered the question, “how do I remove insect infestation from the cupboards?” Martha said a lot of things, but nothing as good as Heloïse, who had lived in the tropics, where the bugs are bigger, stronger, and more varied.
Heloïse advised keeping everything in screw-top jars. You did not go out and buy pretty jars that were marked “Flour,” “Sugar,” etc. from the Martha Stewart Collection. Instead you saved mayonnaise jars, peanut butter jars, and any other glass jar that came with a closeable top. As soon as you brought food home in a paper or cardboard container, you put it into a jar. It was then safe from any wildlife that might wander into your cupboard. If it happened to contain some kind of microscopic eggs when you bought it, well, they were imprisoned in the jar; when you could see the little devils, you threw the closed jar away, protecting the other contents of your closet. Simple, huh?
However, I always thought the true value of Heloïse was in encouraging to women use their brains. (You'll hear a lot of this from me; most stupid people aren't stupid as much as lazy thinkers.) Her basic philosophy went something like this: “there’s no sense killing yourself over housework; his second wife will have a maid.”
Sometimes her ideas took off and caused a minor revolution. She found some cheap nylon net fabric in the dime store and suggested that it would make good curtains for a bathroom – inexpensive, resistant to moisture damage, and really easy to clean. (She pointed out that you could swish them through soapy water, rinse them, and hang them right up again.) When her readers began buying the nylon net, they discovered more uses for it, and she received hundreds of hints. You’ve probably never heard of nylon net curtains, but you know some of the results of Heloïse’s readers. Do you have a nylon bath scrubbie? A nylon vegetable cleaner? A nylon strainer or sieve? Thank you, Heloïse.
So….. for your edification I describe three cheap chemicals that Martha Stewart would never mention.
1. Rubbing alcohol. Inexpensive cleaner disinfectant. Saturate a pad of toilet paper or a folded paper towel with rubbing alcohol and use it to wipe down your bathroom fixtures each morning. They’ll smell clean, you know they’ve been disinfected, and the porcelain and chrome will shine as if you’d spent hours – or a lot of money on Scrubbing Bubbles. (One note of caution: there are a minimum of fumes this way, but they are flammable. Don’t smoke while you do this.)
2. Baking soda, also known as sodium bicarbonate. If you cook or bake, you probably have it in the kitchen already. Use it where you would use scouring powder – a dirty pan or a counter, for example – and rub with a damp paper towel. It cleans as well as a No Scratches product and rinses away easily.
3. Hydrogen peroxide, which you may recognize as a treatment for cuts and scrapes. It will act as a safe bleach on some stains, the most important of which is blood. (I happen to be a nose-bleeder.) Use it full strength, rinse with cold water, and repeat if necessary. I’ve saved a lot of clothes that way.
As you can see, this is not rocket science. It’s just a matter of using what the good Lord gave you and thinking things through. Call it the scientific method, or logic, or the theory of constraints – it can be applied to anything.
