Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Hudson read her column aloud. 

We had a potion, a polish, a cleanser for every room: Under the kitchen sink, Spic and Span, in its orange box, waited at the ready for the floors; there was Mop & Glo for the final shine. By the faucet stood a bottle of Joy, my mom’s preference, but my grandmother swore by Palmolive, emerald green and thick as syrup. Inspired by the commercial, I’d pour some into a little saucer and lower my fingers into the suds, just like the woman on TV, and announce, proud as I could be, that I, too, was “soaking in it.”

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that one of my favorite childhood pastimes was recording television commercial jingles on my portable Panasonic cassette recorder. I’d sit cross-legged on the carpet, right up next to the TV, two fingers hovering over “record” and “play,” waiting for that opening hook. I’d like to teach the world to sing. My bologna has a first name. Sometimes you feel like a nut …

And then there was the catchiest one of all, the song still lodged in my mind: Mr. Clean gets rid of dirt and grime and grease in just a minute; Mr. Clean will clean your whole house and everything that’s in it.

We swiped furniture with Lemon Pledge and worked Old English into the scratches. Pine-Sol lived in the bathroom. Tide and Downy sat side by side on the shelf above the washer. Lysol spray. Comet in its green can. There was a product for every surface, a solution for every problem.

In our house, cleaning was a daily practice — not so much a chore as an everyday act of care. My mother was forever wiping down a counter, fluffing a couch cushion, nudging the fringe of the hallway rug straight with her foot. The house was always being set right again.

As much as I love the scents of North Carolina — sweetshrub in a garden, musky seed mounded in a hardware store bin, pine needles crunching underfoot — nothing makes me feel quite as much at home as the scent of a clean house: lemon and soap, a light lift in the air, evidence that someone has been there, tending to things.

When I’d spend the night at my grandmother’s house, after the dishes had been washed and set in the rack to dry and the heavy aroma of fried chicken, or something sweet, had begun to fade, I’d climb into her bed, freshly made up with percale sheets. Line-dried and crisp. Nobody talked about thread count then, but those sheets felt impossibly smooth, the way well-washed cotton can be, and smelled faintly of talcum powder. My grandmother slept beside me in a nightgown softened by a thousand washings, her gray hair pinned up for the night, little metal clips holding a curl here and there. She slept on her side, peaceful and still, the room clean and calm, and it took me years to understand how much work had gone into making it so — the washing, the folding, the careful keeping of things — how love, repeated daily, had made a place for rest. I lay there in the dark, small and unknowing, breathing it all in, and slept.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief