cleaning house

Sun 10.3.21

      Next week I will be seeking payment for my non-fiction novel, as it is serialized weekly, for my Substack site, https://luhrenloup.substack.com.  I plan to set up a similar arrangement on www.luhrenloup.com where I will create a special page for my novels and tie it to a payment system. 

I am not new to the entrepreneurial world.  After my divorce, I bounced around from one gig to another with no particular idea what I wanted to do at at the time. A friend from our college Women’s Forum group told me she was making ends meet by cleaning house for a number of people she knew. She set the thing up according to her needs. I liked the idea of her independence.  Keeping house was something I certainly was familiar with, so why not give it a shot until I could figure out what I wanted to do?

      I was seeking the light where I understood completely who I am and what was to be my purpose, the state of being where one knows, absolutely down to your tippy toes that it's Ok, it's all Ok, and you are a purposeful human being opening yourself up every day like a flower, blooming, beautiful, enticing, passionate. 

      I, like all good mothers, today pass a dry mop on the floor and swish the feather duster on all horizontal surfaces as we used to say at Housewife Inc., a business that I and my daughter started in Maine.  We were hot!  Many different kinds of women, from princesses to tired housewives, worked for us.  Locked in a van traveling job to job all day with a work crew is an experience not to be missed.

      I didn't know what I wanted to do at the time, but one thing was sure, I didn't want to work for other people; I wanted to create my own thing.  I placed an ad in the local paper in which I called my business Housewife Inc. and offered housekeeping services, even cooking, catering; none of that materialized, thankfully.  The phone started ringing immediately, I couldn't possibly handle all the work myself, so I asked my daughter if she was interested in becoming a partner. 

      Housewife Inc. was launched a week later when the newspaper published a feature on us, with photo, in the business section.  At first we went from site to site with our tools, mops, vacs, cleaning products, buckets, plastic bags, in the back of my car.  I thought up the Housewife Inc name from Murder Inc., It was catchy and also indicated that we were professional.  So off we went to the lawyer, to make the name valid.  We were now in business, and incorporated.  I was the president and she was the treasurer.  We had contracts drawn up for weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly home maintenance, and then straight one-shot deal contracts.  And we got bonded. Diane and I were a good combo.  I tend to be abrupt, she is more conciliatory, which saved us some clients.  We were working at the bottom of the human self-respect job scale.  What society thinks of cleaning women is best left unsaid.  So a lot of this stuff got discussed in the van.  I remember once going to the apartment of 3 Jewish brothers who owned a well-known men's clothing store downtown.  But the apartment, oh gosh, what a filthy, unkempt place. "See, they can't live without us.  There would be no civilization; we are making it all go around," I told the crew.

      Friday being the day reserved for cleaning the rich folks' houses, the new hires on our crew became incensed at the end  their work day.  Seeing all those luxurious homes, and how the people lived was an undeniable fact of life that had never been presented to them up close.   Not fair, not right, they would commiserate at Stekino’s Happy Hour where we gathered at the end of work-week. 

      At first I thought of making the business a co-op where all would share in the profit, but thankfully my lawyer talked me out of it.  A boss is a boss. And without one, big trouble. It was just the two of us at the beginning and we worked like dogs, coming home after dark, dirty, tired.  We started making money, and bought a van, paying cash on the spot, and we had it painted with a little housewife, wearing a white apron over her blue dress, she had glasses with square shaped lenses, hands on her hips, ready to tackle the job. Big, bright yellow letters running across both side of the van proclaiming Housewife Inc.

      Folks would give us the upraised fist when they spotted our Little Flossie (named after William Carlos Williams’ wife, a poet I was fond of at the time.) Right on!  I wrote commercials, little skits, for us to perform on the local radio station.  Diane did the art work for ads, letterheads, business cards, etc.

We joined the Chamber of Commerce and signed up for a Dale Carnegie Course in public speaking and how to influence clients.  I was starting to look toward bigger jobs, banks, business and doctors' offices, factories.  I remember getting a job from an architect who was renovating a big building and had all his subcontractors meet at the site to give us the details.  Big, prosperous business guys, electrical contractors, engineers, carpenters, masons. I stood among them wearing my flowered Hawaiian silk blouse tucked into a pair of jeans, some sneaks, and jangly earrings.  A Martian standing among them couldn't have been more conspicuous.  I had my clipboard in hand ready for the job. 

      Housewife Inc. was dissolved because it was time to move on. Diane had met the man she married and had found what I wanted to do, which is to write.

The favorite post this month has been the podcast, Luhrenloup’s Path