The Minnesota Farm Woman

My mom used to tell me stories of the northern Michigan neighborhood where she grew up. Her small town had a heavy Finnish population, many of whom she referred to as “those clean Finnish ladies” who scrubbed their kitchen floors daily until they were clean enough to toss down a tablecloth and eat off the floor.  Not that they would, mind you, because anything dropped on the floor would be considered dirty no matter how clean it was or how often they scrubbed it.  Growing up, I visited my own clean Finnish relatives and had coffee at many clean Finnish ladies’ homes.  I, too, am a proud Finn, but think that I may have inherited a bad recessive hate-to-clean gene, likely from the Swede or Norwegian sides of the family, because my house most certainly wouldn’t pass muster. In fact, the generations of strong Finnish Farm Women before me are probably rolling in their graves.  My house isn’t necessarily dirty, but it isn’t necessarily clean, either.  At least by Finnish Farm Woman standards, anyway, and I come from a long line of them.   I often think of those ancestors, and wonder how they managed.  True, the women didn’t have to find the time to clean after their full-time jobs, nor did they need  to write a weekly newspaper column before they started scrubbing. They probably had to feed the chickens, milk the cow, wash the clothes by hand, stoke the fire, shovel the snow, knead the cardamom bread, nurse the children, and cook the lutefisk and boil the rutabagas.  Then, and only then, would they have the time to scrub their floors, and probably on their hands and knees.  It was likely the last thing they did before retiring for the night, looking at the spotlessness with pride before the morning’s manure was tracked in by their husbands and it started all over again.  Few of them lived to a ripe old age in a time when a ripe old age was 55.  I think they died that young because they just needed the rest. I have my own personal theory on the cleanliness of those Finnish homes, particularly the floors.  I think that as the lutefisk steamed and boiled over it had to be washed immediately from the floor or it would eat through to the subflooring. That stuff is treated with lye and will burn the hairs out of your nostrils if you dare lift the lid and take a whiff while it is cooking. Anyhow, that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. My grandmother Ena, who was born in 1899, descended from Finnish Farm Women and grew up on a farm, but she prided herself in her modern ways, lived in town, and held a full-time job until she was over 70.  I never saw her scrub the floor on her hands and knees, but she did keep a mop on her back porch.  I don’t remember ever seeing her cook  lutefisk, but she sure could make an awesome batch of chop suey.  She liked to go out dancing, loved to laugh, and drank her coffee strong and black. She occasionally liked a “highball” before dinner and bought her bread from the store.  I’m a lot like her but after a lifetime of living in town, I now live on a farm.  I think that she and the Farm Women before her would be pleased with that. I have some pretty modern ideas myself, too, and I think my grandmother would be proud:  Anybody tracking stuff on my clean kitchen floor would find himself buried in the manure pile and spread in the garden for fertilizer come spring.