In the backyard of the house I grew up in stood a bungalow. It was a summer home back in the 1920's-1940's for weekend vacationers and locals alike. It was a pretty big bungalow, probably 12 feet wide and 20 feet long. It had a huge walk-up attic. By the time my family moved into the home in the 1970's, the bungalow no longer had running water or anything like that. My parents decided to use it for storage, sort of like a shed. Here's sort of what the bungalow looked like, only ours was a bit bigger:
A Shitty Yearly Tradition
My parents stored everything in that bungalow....tools, lawnmowers, bikes, toys, seasonal clothes, documents, housewares, it was like a stockroom for EVERYTHING. Over the course of the year, from everyone going in and out of it to retrieve things, it would get messy. So, once a year, usually in July, it was "clean out the shed day" at my home.
My parents would take the first two weeks of July off every year from work for "vacation". Vacation to them consisted of cleaning, painting, yardwork, etc., we never went anywhere. During that week, my mom would always pick the hottest, most humid day of the year for clean out the shed day. You may be thinking, big deal, how long could this take, right? Well, it started at sunrise. We would proceed to take EVERYTHING OUT of the shed, piece by piece and place it all over the back yard. I swear my mother would read the farmers almanac and look for the warmest predicted day of that calendar year or find out what the hottest date on average was for the year and choose that day for the shed cleaning. As we were pulling EVERYTHING out of the shed she'd come across things that got broken and she'd scream and yell with the cigarette hanging out of her mouth which would be burning down to the filter. She'd try to find out who broke it over the course of the year and curse and go nuts. After all the yelling and all the items would be removed, we'd sweep out the entire shed and then proceed to place everything back into the shed EXACTLY the way she wanted it. I swear this was a 9 hour day. My brother, my sister, and I would cringe when she mentioned clean out the shed day.
Many kids cringed at the thought of the first school day, after clean out the shed day, we were mentally prepared for anything. The first day of school was a walk in the park.
Did any of you have a day or an event that you dreaded each year as a child?
15 comments:
Oh God. Right before Christmas or Easter my mother would go into psycho mood and clean like crazy. We hated it cause she'd make us move all the furniture, wash down the walls, clean the grout in the bathrooms, pretty much gave us all the shitty jobs. I hated it and still have nightmares about that. LOL.
Longest day of the year...
Hmm...
I know there is one, but I can't think of it right now... I just wanted to leave a comment! ;) I know, I know, I'm lame.
I know this is probably really mean, but the day I dreaded the most when I was a kid was when we would drive for 3 hours to go see my great aunt and 2 great uncles in the nursing home. They were really old.
I HATED doing this when I was a kid. Both my great uncles were kinda crazy, so they would just yell out random stuff occasionally like "WHO STOLE MY POTATOES?" or "THAT GODDAMN NURSE IS TRYING TO KILL ME!!" as a child this scared me shitless.
But the worst part of this yearly visit was having to kiss my unlces on the cheeck goodbye. I would get in trouble after we left because I would always cry. :(
My mother never won the award for "Best housekeeper",so the only pressure we had was to dry the dishes. I hated the fact the our house was always messy so by the time I was 13 I used to clean the house for myself and my friends would tell me we had a nice house.But I never revealed the fact that I kept it that way. My brother used to piss me of,intentionally because I would rant and rave if someone made a mess. He would come home from his landscaping job and purposely kick off his grass infested work shoes on the clean floor. I used to get so mad at him that I would cry.
Mine was every Saturday. My brother and I were forced to get out of bed at the crack of dawn and scour the house. My Mom had VERY high standards as well...mopping must be done on hands and knees, no skimping on anything...the only good thing about it being EVERY Saturday is that it never had a chance to get all that filthy
My mom was such a clean freak that my sister and I couldn't leave w/o vacuuming and dusting - EVERYDAY before we left for school. By the time my other 2 siblings came along, she got tired of telling them so they didn't do crap.
september when it was time to go back to school and get fitted for uniforms, her head would spin like the exorcist from trying to get everything done
once a year my parents made us eat liver and onions. i fucking hate liver. and i hate onions. they'd always say some bullshit about iron being good for you, although i never bought it. they never gave us warning either. you had to do the sniff test when my mom started making dinner...liver has an unmistakable smell...and we'd totally panic if we smelled liver. we'd do anything from feigning sickness to just plain hiding, that's how much we hated liver. we'd always be found, though, and have to sit down and eat the liver. after about ten years of seriously long showdowns of "you're eating it" "no I'm not", my parents finally gave up. THANK GOD!
The day swimming lessons started. I had no boobs.
Easy one. Back to school shopping day. Mom would drag all four us to Penney's to buy all the necessary clothes and accessories. It's probably why I dread going into a store to this day.
You know, I spent a good portion of the day trying to figure out if there was, in fact, a day, above all days, that I dreaded the most.
Unfortunately, everything during college is pretty darn blurry and I only have my mom's third-hand accounts of the times prior to college. So, I guess the day I dreaded the most was the day I had to wake up and actually do something with my life... or... at least it will be... yeah... I'm dreading that day.
Just passing through, cool blog by the way.
that's a funny story! We had something similar - Spring Cleaning day. We'd all have to clean up our rooms until they were spotless, get rid of old toys and clutter, etc. There were so many fights as to what we would and wouldn't throw away. :)
the day that I dred .. the first snow fall ... EVERY... FREAK'N... YEAR
Was that the place with the bees???
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