Chores

Chores By Berni Sarazine

It’s a sunny, Monday morning. I’ve been lying here, on the far side of the lilac bushes, stretched out, reading, and hiding. Hiding from my mother. Earlier, at the breakfast table, I couldn’t help but catch that certain gleam in her eyes. You know the one, the one us ‘lazy good- for-nothing’ teenagers hate. The one that says, “We’re going to get some chores done, today, or else”.So I’ve been hiding.

A couple of hours have passed and I am just now realizing that she hasn’t bugged me yet. I am content and comfortable. The lilac bushes are just shady enough. The combination of their fragrance and that of the freshly mowed lawn beneath me is a sweet gift to my olfactory, reminding me how much I love these early summer days. It is peaceful. My choice of reading material, some tawdry romance paperback I picked up at the market last night, is pulling me into its fantasy of love. I am just barely aware of the sounds around me. Birds chirping their familiar top forty tunes. Squirrels chattering about the nut that got away. A gentle breeze leaving and returning, again and again, waking the stray fallen leaves from last autumn and leading them into a dance.

Slowly, seeping into my reverie, I begin to notice a new sound. A familiar sound. An invading sound. The familiar chug, chug, churn, churn of the washing machine. I already know what is coming. Soon I will be hanging laundry on the line. There is no escape. I will eventually have to face the inevitable. Chores- the bane of my existence.

I try to continue reading, but it is of no use. I am preoccupied with my jail sentence. A few minutes pass and I hear steps out the front door, the springy sound of the coil on the screen door, the thud of something heavy hitting the front landing. “Berni, laundry, now!” she yells. I hang my head in resignation and yell back, “I’m coming”, as I grudgingly appear from behind the lilacs. Seeing me, but not looking in my eyes, she says, “There’ll be another load to hang soon, so don’t disappear”, as she marches back into the house like a laundry martyr.

I grab the basket handles and carry it to the other side of the house, toward the clotheslines. I carry it like it weighs a ton, hoping that my mother will catch a glimpse of me through the kitchen window. “See how hard I work for you, mother”, I am thinking. I grab the first item to hang and it is my ‘Rolling Stones’ t-shirt. I drape it over the line, lovingly, and attach two clothespins. I look at it and admire how good it is still looking after a year of washing. And so I begin hanging each item in the basket. Enjoying the smell of fresh laundry, enjoying the breeze blowing around my clothesline kaleidoscope village of color (this is the seventies, remember), enjoying the familiarity of it all. I start singing some overplayed love ballad from the radio and soon I am in another world as the basket slowly empties.

I reach down into the basket and feel nothing. I look and realize I am done. ”That wasn't so bad,” I think to myself, “I can go back and continue enjoying my book now”.

And, then I remember. The second basket.