Our "New Linoleum"

When I was little I had no clue that we were poor. We had clothes to wear and lots of good things to eat. What more could you want. Well at five or six you just don’t know much, believe it or not. My parents could not afford a five dollar piece of linoleum. Linoleum in those days had a thin pattern on top of black sticky stuff that made the backing. The thin pattern wore off within a year or two and needed to be replaced or all that showed was the black back.
Our kitchen linoleum had a strip right down the middle that was all black, with the pretty pattern still showing on the sides where the traffic was less.
Since we couldn’t afford new linoleum, my mother and dad moved all the furniture out of the kitchen, and mother painted the floor by hand with a brush. Our kitchen was twenty six feet long. I can remember she painted it gray. After the floor had dried, She took pieces of sponge that she had cut into pretty shapes, hearts, diamonds, squares, rectangles, stars etc and dipped them into brightly colored containers that had just a little bit of paint in each one; red, green, black, blue and yellow. She carefully, like an artist placed each sponge onto the freshly painted floor with color after color until the whole floor looked so pretty. I have fond memories of how pretty our new floor looked after mother was done with it. She was proud of it too.
Since the kitchen turned out so pretty she wanted the dining room to look nice too. They did pay the five dollars for the new linoleum in there because that was where our guests always sat and visited. The five dollars would only pay for a 9x12 piece of linoleum. So she took dark brown paint and painted all around the edges so that it looked like hardwood trim. The new linoleum was burgundy with gray feather plumes. Real fancy. She was so proud when she finished. So was I until she told me that it would be my job to dust mop the new floors when they were dirty. I evaded the issue, until the inevitable happened and this is a famous quote from my mother, “Lu Anne you can dust mop now if you want to.” Being a little smarty one day I said, “No, I don’t want to.” And of course, she said “do it anyway.” And on it goes, mom’s against little girls or so it seemed.