"My mother used to have..."

The book we’re reading in my creative writing course encourages the aspiring writer to write in a journal everyday. To write anything apparently, like exercise. Of course this idea excites me! So I’m going to use this blog as a sort of journal this semester to try out some of Janet Burroway’s exercises from Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. It’s called “freewriting,” and allegedly, if I’m going to win a Nobel prize someday, I need to do it a lot.
     The first exercise is to use the line “My mother used to have” as a prompt. Here we go.

My mother used to have these cleaning sessions where she would blare The Judds and make my sister and I pull every knickknack off of our living room’s shelves and dust them with rags drenched with lemony Pledge. It was almost a very medical procedure: remove the blue Petoskey stone collected from Mackinaw Island, wipe it off, return it to its proper place next to the VCR.
     But mostly I remember the music and the smell. Once Ashley Judd’s mother and older sister were done singing and the house fell quiet again, the room would feel eerily clean. I didn’t want to sit on anything for a while. I wanted to admire our work and feel good about it, not dirty it up by living. The carpet looked darker because all of the hairs had been brushed to their darker sides. The couch and chairs looked as though they had just arrived from their warehouses.
     Eventually listening to The Judds stopped. I can’t recall when exactly, why, or how, but from my own personal experience, listening to the same few CDs for years on end isn’t possible. (Unless, of course, it’s a Rufus Wainwright album, then we have an exception to the rule.) So I lost touch with Wynona and Naomi and grew into a hatred of all country music thanks to my parents’ excessive listening parties to our local country stations in the family cars.
     But a year or two ago I came across The Judds’ greatest hits album on iTunes and couldn’t pass up the cheap opportunity to download it. The minute I double-clicked that first track the memories of my mother shuffling about our manufactured home (an old “single-wide” mobile home my parents had bought after they married and moved out of my mom’s mother’s house) and singing every last word as she dusted and vacuumed came rushing back. And surprisingly, I didn’t hate it. I don’t hate the Dixie Chicks either, which leads me to theorize that I only like country music that comes before and up to the Judds, and from the Dixie Chicks onward. The gap in there with the country music I hate is the time period of my childhood where I was too cool to like anything that my parents did—plus most country music in the 1990s was just plain shitty.
     When I’m cleaning today I usually listen to some upbeat dance music. The Judds have been set on a shelf like a good memory in a picture frame. Lately, it’s been Madonna. I’ve even toyed with the thought that I might dance and sing to the queen of pop while I’m forcing my kids to help me clean. Will it be her that helps shape my kids’ musical tastes. Will they cherish the memory so many years later and download her on iTunes like I did with The Judds? Would letting my kids listen to Madonna at such a young age make me a bad parent?
     Regardless of the moral implications, it will be fun, just like it was when I was pulling little porcelain figures off of our entertainment center and setting them on the floor next to the Super Nintendo, as my mom crooned nearby, “Have mercy on me!”