It's Saturday. Clean like a Dutch housekeeper.

One afternoon thirty-some years ago, when I first started work at the job that would ultimately become my career, I was summoned to a co-worker's desk. He thought it would be funny to show me some sketches of sexy lingerie in a Frederick's of Hollywood catalog. Why, I don't know. Maybe he was still thrown off-balance by having women in the same job he was doing, although I was by no means the first one to share his workplace. Maybe he was a pervert--he did seem overly amused when he rubbed his fingers on the sketched brassieres modeled by headless, legless torsos in the catalog. Or maybe he was just a moron.

In any case, thinking to call him out for his inappropriate behavior, I said, "Why would you call me over here for that? Aren't you married?" (Okay, so I was thinking on my feet and that's the best I could do, as I was taken quite by surprise.)

"Yes," he said, "my wife is Dutch... those Dutch women are good housekeepers!"

At that point, my Inner Feminist was ready to let loose and kick him a good one in the... shin, or whatever. I didn't want to get fired for assaulting a moron though, even one who was also a male chauvinist oinker, so I just went back to my desk and did my best to ignore him forever after.

Fast-forward to this morning, when I set out to learn a bit about the history of Schoharie County, New York, where my Efner ancestors lived during the first half of the 1800s. The population there was largely Dutch and German. I had to laugh when I read the following passage in History of Schoharie County, and Border Wars of New York--it was the last thing I expected to see in a history book:

I had occasion, in the fore part of this book, to speak of the cleanliness of the pioneer settlers, and now advert to that of their descendants—and in justice must observe, that few, if any districts can show a greater proportionate number of very tidy housekeepers, than may now be seen in the Schoharie valley.

Twice in a year, at least, Dr. Franklin's description of a house cleaning is realized, not only in the primitive Schoharie, but in the Mohawk river settlements. Every article of furniture, from the garret to the cellar, is then removed, that the place it occupied may be scrubbed. Lime is profusely used on such occasions, especially in the Spring, and it would be difficult to detect the track of a fly on a window, wall, or floor, after the operation. The description given by Brooks, in his travels in Europe, of the neatness of the people in some of the Dutch and German countries through which he traveled, is applicable, in many instances, to the people of Schoharie: for as he says—"It is scrub, scrub, scrub from morning till night—from pillar to post—where there is dirt, and where there is none." The Schoharie women usually cleanse their floors daily, sometime semi-daily, by a process they call filing, which is done with a piece of sacking retained in the hands instead of being secured to a mop-stick.

I just know there's gotta be an ironic punchline around here somewhere.

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Simms, Jeptha Root. History of Schoharie County, and Border Wars of New York: Containing Also a Sketch of the Causes Which Led to the American Revolution; and Interesting Memoranda of the Mohawk Valley... Illustrated with More Than Thirty Engravings. Albany: Munsell & Tanner, printers, 1845 (pp. 603-604).