It’s almost time for spring cleaning. How many of us talk about that as if it was a big chore? When it comes right down to it, we no longer do the massive cleaning our mothers and grandmothers tackled.
Instead of taking down all the curtains and shaking them outside to get rid of the winter dust, we vacuum them and maybe get them cleaned and put away for another year. Scatter rugs get shaken year-round. We no longer hang winter clothing on the clotheslines to “air out,” probably because most of us don’t have clotheslines any longer.
How long has it been since every closet in your house was emptied, dusted, washed and all the contents sorted into piles for disposition? Some things were kept, some went to the hand me down pile and some went into the wonderful rag bag that hung in the cellarway.
Did your childhood home have a rag bag – or a cellarway? Perhaps not. Today, it would be a recycling bag and stairs to the basement, I guess.
The rag bag was a source of many hours of childhood entertainment, as I recall. Into the rag bag went worn out clothes fit for nothing much. Since children’s clothing was destined to be handed down to the next child in the family, there were few kids items in this bag. My father’s worn out shirts, my mother’s old dresses, clothes that fit no one but had been given to us – these went into the rag bag.
When my sisters and I got really bored, we’d beg to get something from the rag bag and we’d dress up, borrowing hats and high-heeled shoes to finish off the ensemble. I remember parading up the old dirt Chute Road, wheeling a baby carriage, with our family cat tucked under old baby blankets. We must have presented a strange family portrait!
When sheets became literally threadbare, they went into the rag bag. If my mom needed a new mop, she’d go to the rag bag and tear pieces of cloth to the right size until she had enough to fit into the clamp on the mop handle.
Sometimes there would be a few things in the rag bag that had perhaps a half yard of “good” material. These would be carefully cut out and filed in the sewing box where eventually, the material would become part of a quilt or apron.
When something was spilled on the old red brick-patterned linoleum floor in the kitchen, the rag bag was dug into for a piece of material to wipe up the liquid. Rags from the rag bag were taken when my father was working on the plow or some old car out in the yard. Today, one can buy bags of wiping rags at the hardware store.
Some older seniors reading this may remember rag bags at their house. They’ll likely recall the walls along the old wood or stone cellar stairs, where little makeshift shelves held jars of bright red jam, apple butter, pickles and other delicious treats. Down in the cellar were more glass jars filled with all kinds of vegetables, the harvest from the summer gardens and the results of hours of berry-picking in the hot sun. Two or three wood divisions along the wall made bins that held potatoes, coal and kindling wood. A couple of big wooden boxes were filled with squash. Mesh bags of onions hung from the ceiling.
When we start our spring cleaning this year and we get out our modern equipment, let’s give a thought to the way things used to be. Given the condition of the economy, we may well go back to those days.
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