by Katharine Trauger

What in the world is a shiny window?

All my life I’ve loved clear, clean, shiny windows.

But not the job.

Oh, the work didn’t disturb me, but ick—I did not thrill at the insect mortuary in the windowsill I had to plow through every spring. Nope. And I did not like icky soap water running down (up?) my arms and soaking my clothes as I reached for the higher panes.

Sometimes I put it off until fall. Don Aslett preferred fall cleaning, right?

However! Once my children grew old and large enough to be trusted with large panes of glass and large masses of dead bugs, I decided I would pay them to do the windows.  They’d learn to desire an education that way, right?

Through the years, I’d developed a system and could do an entire window in an hour. That included removing and washing all storms and screens, cleaning out the bug mortuary, drying everything, polishing what needed it, and putting it all back, At the time, $5.00 per hour was minimum wage…

They’d seen me struggle, though. They were unsure. Until they did the math—Twenty-two windows at five dollars each, was more money than they’d ever received at once, and plenty to lure them into taking over my job. Yay!

One of the big blessings of owning children is being allowed to tell them what to do when no one else on earth can do so. Ha.

For a long while, I was surrounded by taller-than-me persons who could always use an extra $110. I loved it. These kiddos of mine knew my mantra: If it’s still dirty, it still needs to be cleaned. But they also loved me and knew I’d make payroll.

They did it for the payroll…

I reveled in their cleaning my dirty windows every year. It took them weeks, because of working around other activities. They reveled in the big bucks they earned. I napped while they struggled with screens and storms. I laughed at their huge eyes when they saw the bug mortuaries. I smiled benevolently when I paid them, knowing they had earned every penny and they were totally pleased to be filthy rich.

I grew complacent and lazy.

Then the creek dried up.

I am convinced that the main cause of the empty nest syndrome is that the mom has to do her own housework.

All of it.

She is the only one left at home in a building huge enough to launch a crowd of teens into the wilds.

We are up to 27 windows in our current house. The sunroom, alone, contributes eleven of them to entertain the cleaning personnel. Our kiddos have all graduated from college and found great jobs.

Now they own windows that need cleaning.

What’s a mother to do?

I began looking around for other teens to adopt—just for 27 hours—and I found one!

It happened while I was tutoring a friend’s child. I kept noticing she had all these chores to do and was brave enough to take care even of horses, but careful enough to love on baby chicks and keep them alive, too.

She’d tended our animals before and had done well. She needed 4-H money. I thought she might be good.

I proposed. She accepted. That was two years ago and we have become the dynamic duo.

This girl can wash the windows, sills, and screens, outdoors, faster than I can do only the insides of the windows. And yes, she’s watching and she considers me slow. Her innovation and determination caused her to invent ever-increasing methods for speed at window-washing.

She literally washes and dries two to four windows at once, including the sills and screens.

And she’s really good about not crushing foundation plantings, and not ripping screens.

She is so fast that what I’d thought would be at least a two-day job lasted only one morning. You won’t believe how shiny my windows are…

And at five dollars a pop, she’s feeling pretty rich, her only trouble being that she wishes we’d clean windows twice a year.

I’m thinking about it.

 Katharine Trauger is a retired educator and a women’s counselor. She and her husband spent 25 years running a home and school for children who would otherwise have been homeless and has worked 15 years as contributor and/or columnist for several small professional magazines, with over 60 published articles. She blogs about the rising popularity of “being at home” from a sun room on a wooded hilltop in the Deep South at Home’s Cool! and The Conquering Mom and tweets at Katharine Trauger (@KathaTrau). She is currently working on a self-help book entitled: Yes, It Hurts, But . . .