Chuckles at Martha's Expense

In today's mail I got a free Martha Stewart calendar. It has ever-so-tasteful flowers or food on every page and contains a schedule of homemaking tasks to do throughout the year. A few of the scheduled tasks are good for laughs, primarily because of the obvious disconnect between how over-the-top Martha Stewart lives and how ordinary mortals live. We do not have a housekeeping staff, a hired gardener, and a builder/maintenance person at our beck and call. If we garden, we pick anything that's ready as soon as it's ready. When we clean we do it while the rest of life goes on. We rest on Sundays. We snatch small pleasures en route to meeting our daily obligations. Martha Stewart, on the other hand, recommends this:

January 20: (Sunday) Clean out freezer.

April 12: Spring cleaning: clean house from basement to attic.

April 26: Prepare garden beds. (It takes me a day to find the stakes, string, sledge, measuring instruments, seeds, rake, hoes, etc.)

June 1: (Sunday) Pick strawberries to make jellies and jams. (By all means keep your fingers out of the mush from strawberries that should have been picked on May 28, or 26, or 24, or. . . .)

June 13: Pick young vegetables (Fancy that! On a certain day in June you're going to go out to the garden to pick the year's supply of young vegetables.)

July 16: Weed, weed, weed. (I presume Martha knows it might take an axe or a chainsaw if this is to be the first day for weeding.)

August 4: Water, water, water. (This won't revive already dead plants that should have been watered on July 4.)

September 1: Ramadan begins at sundown. (Hmmmm. I've never had this on my schedule before.)

October 19: View fall foliage. (Too bad I won't be allowed to look before then on my way to school.)

"Martha, Martha, thou art troubled about many things. . . ."