A Monday Memory....

Anyone else old enough to remember these?  

I recently came across a "pin" of these products on Pinterest, which immediately sparked a memory from June days gone by. In our grammar school, the last week of classes called for intense cleaning, beginning with our desks.

We were required to bring in our own supplies - wax and clean rags.

My mother generally sent me in with Pledge and an old undershirt.

My nearest desk neighbors would sometimes have the Jubilee wax glass bottle, pictured above. 

 I confess, I preferred the smell and consistency to my Pledge spray.  Thankfully, fellow students were always generous when it came to sharing their cleaning products.

Wiping down the desk tops always proved to be the easiest part of the operation.

Discovering what was lurking in the deep recess of our desks could bring either joy or disgust.

As I recall, the girls seemed more methodical in their approach - pulling out individual items and laying them neatly in a pile on the floor.  The boys?  They would pull out the lot all in one go.  Or maybe the teacher would find it necessary to speed up the process for them, and simply turned their desks over, emptying the contents in a lump in front of their feet.

Once our desks were cleaned, books stowed safely on the back shelves for the summer and excess debris packed away in our bookbags, we turned our attention to the rest of the classroom.  Individual and group duties were assigned by our teacher, the more coveted tasks being those which required a trip to deliver something, somewhere else in the school building.

A few people may feel that students shouldn't have to clean up their classrooms - it should be left for the staff. The truth is, at least for me, I enjoyed those days.  

Putting the room to rights, as they say, gave us a sense of closure.  As we toiled, our endeavours offered a last chance for a few more casual conversations with classmates, before heading off in our separate directions for the summer.  And we most certainly learned cleaning and organizing skills.

There was also a sense of camaraderie, and a bit of relief I suspect, as we set about our tasks.  A feeling of having come through the year together.  

In my life, some of the more lasting "lessons" I learned in school didn't come from a textbook.