Yesterday, I wrote on the blog about my decision to clean our greasy oven which almost caught fire from grease and oil that accumulated during my enthusiastic cooking escapades. This is a task I have always left to house cleaners or to spouses. It never occurred to me to do it, I was never asked, I had no idea how it was done.

I do all of the shopping and cooking now, and I love it. So I can’t walk away from a dirty stove. When we noticed the grease Maria offered to clean it, and it occurred to me that I had never cleaned an oven, even though I had lived around them my whole life and I am the one who clogged it up (I bought a nice fire extinguisher also). Men sometimes seal themselves off from their own lives – I did – and I am working to change that. Maria, normally a chore obsessive was thrilled to turn this job over to me. I wanted to report on how it turned out.

I am mostly done. There is some caked stuff along the sides so I have one more round to go, but it is nearly ready and Maria is impressed. I am startled. It is a dirty job, but I can’t say it was that unpleasant, surely not when compared to barn-mucking in mud and ice. I went to Ace Hardware and we went over several options. I used Easy Off (no fumes, a bit more expensive but worth it during the winter when you can’t really air out the room). I bought a soft brush and some heavy duty towel paper. They want to know how it went. I’m not sure they really do, but they seemed to want to know and I appreciate that. I probably don’t want to be walking around town telling people about my oven cleaning experience.

There are several options. One is a warm cleaning, where you turn the stove on, then cool down, apply cleaner and wipe it off. One is a two-hour cold cleaning – spray and leave it for two hours, and the third is the overnight option: spray and leave it all night to really sink in. I opted for the last two. In the afternoon I sprayed the grease spots heavily, and then after dinner, I took a metal spatula (I never needed the brush) the paper towels and a spoon and went to work. I gather the grease into piles and then reached in – the toughest part are the angles around the heating element, taking care not to harm it. I put the glop and soiled towels into a garbage bag I opened and hung next to the stove. Nasty drips.

I thoroughly scraped off the grease – some of it was caked – with the spatula a good tool because it is low and flat and you can get under the elements. It would be easy to damage the elements. This morning I did more wiping and scraping. I have one more light spraying to do – some stuff on the sides and we will be able to use the stove by tonight. The Easy Off is powerful and the scraping did not take that long. It was simpler than I expected, easier than I had been warned about. Chores are struggle stories, but they are also more than that. They are the small tasks that comprise our lives. I am learning to respect them and not to speak poorly of them.

Some of the best advice I ever got in my life was from the Rev. Billy Graham, with whom I traveled when I was a reporter doing a profile of him. Don’t squawk about the price of gas or food, he said, and don’t speak poorly of chores. If you do, you will spend a lot of your life in misery and anger because the cost of things always rises, and life consists of many chores and they are never done. I am very proud to say that since that evening, I have never complained about the price of things. I have spared myself a lot of pointless anger and frustration. He might have added taxes.

It is fascinating to me that I never did this oven cleaning before.  Gender is a complex subject, and men live their whole lives without being included in much of it, or wanting to know things. Now, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I can handle the whole process  of food and eating- shopping, being mindful of choice and cost, eating in a healthy way, cooking, and now keeping the oven clean. From beginning to end. Took me awhile. Chores are important, I have learned, because it is so easy for people, especially men, to become detached from their own surroundings, to become such a stranger to their own lives that there is no choice but to hire people to live our lives.

Oven cleaning is not a woman’s work, at least not to me. Moving to the new farm and running out of money was a boon in that regard. I had no choice but to understand how things worked, and so I began to learn. If I had a lot of money, it wouldn’t have happened.  I want to be able to be responsible for myself and because chores make that happen, they are not unpleasant. And about time.