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# She was singing
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/she-was-singing/
- Published: 2026-09-11T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-11T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes

*"One generation shall laud your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts." — Psalm 145:4*

My mother turned the house upside down every September and I have not done it once since she died.

Fall cleaning, she called it, and she meant it the way a general means a campaign. The last week of good weather, windows open, everything out of the closets and onto the beds. Rugs over the line and beaten with a wire beater that hung on a nail in the shed. Curtains down and washed and back up damp so they would dry straight. She turned the mattresses. She washed the insides of the windows and then the outsides, standing on a kitchen chair, which I was not allowed to say anything about.

She had a system and the system did not vary and the whole thing took her four days.

I was not much help. I want to be honest about that. I was a girl who wanted to be reading, and I would get handed a rag and a bowl of vinegar water and put on the baseboards, which is the job you give a child who is going to wander off, because the baseboards do not matter and nobody checks. I wandered off. She let me.

But I stood in the doorway some of those afternoons and watched her work, and what I remember is not the cleaning. It is that she was singing. Not hymns, particularly. Whatever was in her. She sang while she beat the rugs and she sang while she did the windows, and the house in the last week of September smelled like vinegar and open air and sounded like my mother.

I did not learn fall cleaning from her. I learned it and then I let it go, one year at a time, the way you let go of a thing that was somebody else's discipline and never quite became yours.

What I learned was the singing. I did not know that was the transmission. I thought the rugs were the transmission. I was watching for the wrong thing, the way children always are.

The psalm says one generation shall laud your works to another. It does not say how. I used to think it meant teaching, because I am a teacher and everything looks like teaching to me. Now I think mostly it happens sideways, while somebody is doing something else, and the child in the doorway takes down the wrong lesson and it turns out to be the right one.

I hummed over the tomatoes last week. I noticed it at the time and thought it was only the kitchen being warm.

It was not. She got me after all.

*Lord, for what came down to me without anybody meaning it to.*