We Clean House ~ My Russian Yesterdays, Catherine de Hueck Doherty

By Catherine de Hueck Doherty, My Russian Yesterdays, Madonna House Publications, used with permission

Catherine was brought up in Russia and had many fond memories of her life there….a life that reflected simplicity, family, religion. After fleeing Russia during the Communist Revolution, she eventually came into the Catholic Church. Catherine prayed much that her motherland would be freed from Communist rule so that people could once again openly practice their faith.

What a beautiful description of cleaning the house when life was simpler. All things were offered to Our Lady and her Son as those in the Russian yesterdays did their spring cleaning. We would do well to order everything around the Holy Mother of God as we do our daily duties each day. Many blessings await each day….

We Clean House

The Sunday paper is full of ads about materials and short cuts for spring cleaning. Through the open window I can hear, above the noises

of the traffic, two birds quarreling. The nasturtiums I planted two weeks ago in the window boxes are coming up. Definitely spring is here.

The paper lies at my feet, unheeded. The sounds of traffic and the quarreling of the birds barely reach my consciousness. Again I have journeyed into my yesterdays, this time, into that special, that very special, week when we cleaned house.

There were few short cuts to the work in those days, and if there had been any, I don’t think they would have been accepted. For we looked on work as a hallowed occupation, blessed by the ways of centuries past, to be started in God, for God, and with a prayer to God. The home was the symbol of Christ and His Church, and the cleaning thereof was something holy; to be done according to customs, which, perhaps unconsciously, took the place of rubrics.

Also it was fun. We made most of our cleaning materials ourselves. And the preparations for the important week started almost a year ahead. First there had to be a survey, of course; for, in all things of life, the Russian housewife believed there must be order, the tranquility of order.

So, with paper and pencil, each room would be gone over, and the work to be done noted down and divided into the days at hand. Laundering, dyeing, scrubbing, washing, polishing, airing-each had its turn, its proper place. And the making ready for each was a task apart.

For instance, there was the question of curtains. Everyone knows that these fade through the year. So they had to be redyed. And that would bring us to summer, to the gathering of flowers and roots from which we would make the vegetables dyes for the faded curtains next spring. What fun it used to be!

Up with sunrise. A hot, full breakfast. Everyone gathering with baskets and linen bags, ready for the day. Mother reciting a prayer to St. Martha, the patron saint of the home. Off we would go, several miles down the road, into the fields and forests that held the precious plants we needed for the days’ work.

I always chose the fields and the collecting of cornflowers. I loved to walk through the golden wheat fields where they made their home. There they were. Vividly blue. Beckoning to me. Here, there, and everywhere.

It was a pity they had to be squeezed into a linen bag that hung over my shoulder. But still it was fun to gather them. They give such a lovely shade of blue too, to the materials dyed. I have never found that exact shade since. Somehow, it always made me think of our Lady’s gown. I wager it was just that beautiful soft shade of cornflower blue …

To get this blue we used to put the cornflowers into gallon bottles filled with alcohol and let them stand until almost the next spring, on the sunniest window of the house.

Other flowers and roots we mashed and boiled, filtering their coloring into dark brown, slender bottles for next spring’s need. The New York Public Library has a little book on vegetable dyes that, positively, has the ability to make me homesick.

Then there was the brass and copper to clean. All the kitchen utensils were made of those metals in my young days. That meant polishing and then some! But what a beautiful, gorgeous sight is a spotless kitchen with shelf upon shelf of gleaming brass and copper!

Frankly, I never saw “Brasso” or other similar cleaning aids until I came to America, yet I have cleaned positively thousands of pots and pans. For this we used bread. Ordinary rye bread.

Gathering the leftovers, the crusts, we soaked them in a little water, allowing them to become sour and ferment. With this “mush” we cleaned the copper and the brass. And does it clean? It surely does!

For all the endless washing and scrubbing that Russian housewives love so, one needs pounds and pounds of soap. We made our own, naturally. So there was the collecting of fats and the boiling of them with lye. And again to me, every step in the art of making soap was fun.

St. Martha was there, of course. You brought her there with a little prayer. If you forgot, that was just too bad. The soap would be too dry, or too soft, as sure as you were alive.

Only those who have made soap know the joy of cutting it into tidy, soft, large squares, and putting the cakes into the sun to dry.

Floors were polished with wax. Hard floors, that is. We had our own beehives, and so our own wax, for floors, for candles, and for vigil lights. Mother used to make the candles. The special prayers that go with each were beautiful but hard to translate.

Wax making started, as all work did, with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit …

The soft white pine floors were scrubbed, not with a floor brush but with brooms made out of birch branches that had been gathered the year before and dried in the barn. Some leaves would still be clinging to them and smelling sweet and “green” when immersed in hot water. They made a grand “brush” to scrub floors with. And they went well with the homemade soap and the clean yellow sand. The floors came out dazzling white …

Mending and sewing was, of course, an important part of spring cleaning. I loved the sewing room, with its big ikon of our Blessed Mother of Kazan, before which burned an extra big vigil light; its two sewing machines; its long cutting tables.

From the ceiling rafters hung, in orderly rows, linen threads made of our own flax and dyed with our own dyes, and long skeins of wool from our own sheep, also dyed at home.

Yes, the preparation for spring cleaning began a year ahead. And after it was all over, each room would be sprinkled with holy water. Then we would all go to the steam bath, wash thoroughly, and go to confession and Communion, returning to a breakfast of tea with thick cream, freshly made buns, and raspberry jam!

That paper lying at my feet … How varied are the short cuts and the cleansing materials it offers! How varied and how dull! Because of them, much of the fun and the joy and the satisfaction of cleaning a house have gone, never, perhaps, to return.

Angelo didn’t pack much in his big suitcase for their trip to France, Spain and Portugal. Well… he really couldn’t….because he needed room for his juggling paraphanalia!

Here are a couple of videos on the landing waiting to board their river cruise in Paris, Angelo puts on a show for a group of South Koreans!

Beautiful Blessed Mother And Child Wire Wrapped Rosary! Lovely, Durable. Each link is handmade and wrapped around itself to ensure quality. Available here.

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In With God in Russia, Ciszek reflects on his daily life as a prisoner, the labor he endured while working in the mines and on construction gangs, his unwavering faith in God, and his firm devotion to his vows and vocation. Enduring brutal conditions, Ciszek risked his life to offer spiritual guidance to fellow prisoners who could easily have exposed him for their own gains. He chronicles these experiences with grace, humility, and candor, from his secret work leading mass and hearing confessions within the prison grounds, to his participation in a major gulag uprising, to his own “resurrection”—his eventual release in a prisoner exchange in October 1963 which astonished all who had feared he was dead.

Powerful and inspirational, With God in Russia captures the heroic patience, endurance, and religious conviction of a man whose life embodied the Christian ideals that sustained him…..

Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. Only through an utter reliance on God’s will did he manage to endure the extreme hardship. He tells of the courage he found in prayer–a courage that eased the loneliness, the pain, the frustration, the anguish, the fears, the despair. For, as Ciszek relates, the solace of spiritual contemplation gave him an inner serenity upon which he was able to draw amidst the “arrogance of evil” that surrounded him. Ciszek learns to accept the inhuman work in the infamous Siberian salt mines as a labor pleasing to God. And through that experience, he was able to turn the adverse forces of circumstance into a source of positive value and a means of drawing closer to the compassionate and never-forsaking Divine Spirit.

He Leadeth Me is a book to inspire all Christians to greater faith and trust in God–even in their darkest hour. As the author asks, “What can ultimately trouble the soul that accepts every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God and strives always to do his will?”
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