Aprons & Baked Apples

Domesticity and I parted ways decades ago - it went its way and I went mine and we haven't crossed paths since - but every now and again, I think of it with a little fondness.  Well....almost.

Tradition decreed marriage and family for a girl child.  I knew this from an early age but while I thought marriage might be acceptable, I had no illusions about children - I knew as surely as I knew anything that I didn't want them - the idea of childbirth was bad enough but the prospect of a lifetime of responsibility and nurturing was paralyzing.  I refused to even consider the thought of such a burden and though I sometimes wondered if there was some integral missing motherhood link in my genetic makeup, I had no regrets.  I felt the same about cooking and sewing, coffee klatches and dinner parties and cleaning house in a cute little number with heels and hose and pearls.  Self sacrifice just wasn't my strong suit.

Junior high school did not share this attitude, however, and come 7th grade I was forced into a home economics class - one year of learning to make a baked apple, one year of learning to make an apron.  The oven and the sewing machine became my instant enemies and the class only reinforced my conviction that women were silly, trivial creatures with the instincts of sheep.  My repeated requests to transfer to the shop class were denied with appalled looks and while the apple turned out to be passable enough, on the last day of school I tossed the apron into the first trash can I came to.  Oddly enough I still remember it - red and gray, the school colors - with trimmed pockets and ribbon edging.

The inevitable results of my disdain for the domestic life - being unable to sew on a button, barely able to boil water - don't trouble me all that much.  The ancient oven in the kitchen gave up the ghost months ago and I didn't see the point in having it repaired or replaced.  Any matched pieces of leftover revere ware are purely accidental.  I doubt I could put together a full place setting using the same silverware and there's a drawer in the dining room filled with table linens, price tags still attached.  It just goes to show how we change, how the things that are important to us change, how we trick ourselves with possessions and material things.  I console myself with a simple fact - if I'd had children, they might be as dust covered and neglected and useless as aprons and baked apples.  Unless the old cycle of life thing kicked in and then they might very well have become the height of domestic engineers.  I've often thought that somehow children grow up hungry for what they don't have - raised in a rigid religious home, they become devoted atheists, raised to be neat freaks, they celebrate disorder - until their children come along and the whole process reverses itself.

Who can tell where aprons and baked apples will lead.