Chemistry 101, the Home Edition

In thermodynamics, entropy is commonly associated with the amount of order, disorder, and/or chaos in a thermodynamic system. To completely understand this, it may take a degree in Chemistry. However, the basic concept is simple. If you have chaos or any degree of disorder, it takes energy to bring things back into order. Thus, depending on the relative amount of disorder, it takes more or less energy to restore things to their ordered state. Since my mother earned her degree in Chemistry, I honestly believe, she understood this concept better than the average individual.

Growing up in a family with 8 children, chaos seemed more the norm than the organized confusion you might expect. It all started with the the first period bell. Getting us all fed and off to school was a major accomplishment unto itself. I can still see the sandwiches all lined up on the counter being made as if they were rolling off an assembly line. One by one, my mother would wrap them, and pack them in a brown paper bag. Sometimes the bags would have been reused, just to save a few pennies and each one with the name beautifully hand written in cursive on the outside.

After school, we'd come home to Mom ironing on her very own mangle iron, the sheets and other clothes then folded neatly, so they would look good in their respective drawers upstairs. Maybe it was moving day. That's when we acted like our very own moving company, moving furniture from room to room simply to provide some change. Maybe she'd been to the grocery store, so we were enlisted to carry in all those grocery bags, enough for several trips apiece. Or maybe it was Wednesday, when Mrs. King had come to help with the cleaning. The house had finally been put back in "order", along with the nicely waxed kitchen floor.

Then there was the task of preparing dinner. General Patton may have said, "Feeding an army is not easy."; my mother had little choice, because she had her own army of foot soldiers. Parsley potatoes, cube steak, and green beans might have been a typical menu accompanied by the customary glass of milk. The after dinner chores were carried out according to the "list" found on the refrigerator door. We rotated the responsibilities to make it fair.

The bedtime routine varied somewhat from day to day, but you could always count on prayers followed by Mom making the sign of the cross of our foreheads. The day was almost done. I feel sure that there would have been a debriefing between the respective commanders before they actually turned in too.

Running a household, may be more like commanding a battalion or being a CEO of a company than being a Chemistry professor, However, if you apply the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I feel quite certain that it takes far more energy to keep a household in order, than it does to permit the randomness of chaos. I know of at least one Chemistry "teacher" who had enough energy for her "home brood" experiments to keep everything in order!