Browning chief. [volume] (Browning, Mont.) 1941-1953, 1947-09-12
By KATHLEEN NORRIS
Released by Western N,

THERE is a woman in our
town who talks constantly
L of the help she needs, and
yet who won't have help. Eve
known her fairly Intimately for
twenty years, and I know now
that she never will get out of the
discontinued complaining rut in
which she is intrenched.
She has four children, a not-too-
successful husband, and a large
house. Two rooms in the house are
occupied by boarders. That repre-
sents lot Of work; Hannah Woods
does it all.
She gets up at 6, or even earlier
If unfinished jobs spoil her sleep.
Her first hour in the kitchen is one
mad whirl; coffee pots, griddle,
orange squeezer, sugar bowl, table
setting, toasting, breaking eggs. She
tears the tops off milk and cream
bottles, whips plates into the oven,
rushes to stir bacon, rushes back
to put spoons and sugar on the ia
BILE. The family and the boarders
struggle in, and sometimes the girls
dawdle to the sink with their emp
tied plates and cups, and sometimes
they don't.
Nancy and Babs 60 off to office
jobs, Stan to college and Bill to
school. Hannah clears the table,
piles things in the sink, goes up
stairs to struggle for long hour
with beds, linen, bathrooms. Yes,
and does all the incidental things;
laundry must be gathered; the flow
ers in Babs' room are faded; Bill
has left broken glass on the bath
room floor.
Down goes Mother, heated and
weary by this time, to dust the par
lor, put the records back in their
places, straighten the chairs, carry
pop bottles out to the kitchen.
Then to the kitchen itself, and she
is often still there when Bill comes
in for twelve o'clock lunch.
Dozens of Tasks.
It isn't only the dishes. It's the
interruption of telephone, grocery
deliveries, tailor, odds and ends of
extra cleaning, consolidating food,
planning meals and scraping vege-
tables for them, mixing desserts.
Hannah is good cook, her fam
lily of eight praises her generously.
But the pattern of steady house
keeping, steady routine work, week
out and week in, exhausts her
body, mind and spirit. She does
rest sometimes, in the afternoons,
but it is rest punctuated by uneasy
thoughts about the extra cream, the
time the smoked tongue will take to
cook, the non-delivery of STAINS
sweater, the promise she made to
telephone Bills gym teacher. She
looks YEARLY at the magazines
coasting from their stand, at an
overlooked ash tray, at the rip in
the window shade.
In short, Hannah Woods has
made her life into the pattern in
which a devoted, Woodworking, stu
pid, unsystematic woman often
struggles for years, and she doesn't
know the way out.
She loves her children better than
her own life, but she has carefully
raised them not only to wreck her
marriage, but some day to make
failures of their own. Sally, Babs,
Stan and Bill have never been
trained or asked to help Mother.
They would be innocently shocked
to know how deeply they have failed
her and how cruelty she has
failed them.
These boys, who could toss open
their own beds, hang up towels and
pajamas, wipe the line from the
bathtub and brush the porches, an
swer the telephone, stop in down.
town and pay bills, send home un-
expected additions to the home ia