By EDNA FERBER
From Ladies Home Journal
Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She started with
the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar in strict accordance with
Article I, Section I, Unwritten Rules for House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had
done it. For twenty-five years she had hated it--being an intelligent woman. For twenty-
five years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled up--the
costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of What's-Her-Name, mother of
Lemuel (see Proverbs)--Mrs. Brewster had gone through the ceremony twice a year.
Furniture on the porch, woolens on the line, mattresses in the yard--everything that could
be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed, flapped, shaken or aired was dragged out and
subjected to one or all of these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were
dragged in again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar, things had
piled up higher and higher--useless things, sentimental things; things in trunks; things in
chests; shelves full of things wrapped up in brown-paper parcels.
And boxes--oh, above all, boxes; pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square and oblong,
each bearing weird and cryptic pencilings on one end; cryptic, that, is to anyone except
Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked
one long slim box. Another stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid
its contents under "Slp Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing
fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key they translated
themselves simply enough into such homely items as Hosey's fishing tackle, canvas
curtains for Ted's sleeping porch, slip-covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-
parlour valence.
The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American household life as
lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin. Hosey's
rheumatism had prohibited trout fishing these ten years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the
li'l' ol' sky" was his sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the
neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pink's rose-cretonne room had lacked an
occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the Chicago Art Institute,
thence to New York and those amazingly successful magazine covers that stare up at you
from your table--young lady, hollow chested (she'd need to be with that décolletage),
carrying feather fan. You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves
the black net dress and sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too tight under the arms
(Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded.
Now don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking, ginghamed old
soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a palsied rose atop it. Nor that
Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of
