The Tradition (an excerpt)

(This is an excerpt from my Part 2 story. I would really appreciate to have your thoughts.)

The Tradition

Every Saturday my family had a cleaning day. My father during that day did outside chores such as chopping wood for our pechka, a Russian stove that was painted white and occupied almost half our kitchen. It was warming up our two bedroom cozy house. My dad, at first, would throw old newspapers in it and then dry pieces of wood. The kitchen would slowly become warmer and the sounds of burning wood lulled our cat. The cat had no name. After running all day in the snow, the cat would sit on top of the stove. She was missing a tail and both of her ears. They fell off because they froze in the cold Siberian winter. The cat’s fur had a yellowish color as she would often fall asleep on the stove and burn her sides. My dad usually threw her from the stove but she still would jump back on it when he was not watching.

On Saturday mornings my mom would wake us up around 9 a.m. We ate semolina milky and buttery soup for breakfast and drunk hot tea. Our cleaning day began shortly after that. My mother gave us little chores. I, 5, would iron my sister’s dresses and mine. My sister, 3, would try to help me fold clothes, however she would make a mess instead.

My mother, while we were occupied, washed every corner of the house. Sitting on her knees she would scrape the floors. She also washed all the clothes by hand, including our bed sheets. Then, she hanged them outside. The cold air would make my mother’s hands red and dry. In the evening, my father would bring all the clothes inside. After hanging for hours in freezing temperature, they resembled ice sculptures. In the house they would slowly begin to melt, and steam from them would spread around the kitchen. My parents hung these sculptures on ropes across the kitchen, and my sister and I would run under them imagining that they were glaciers.
On the outskirts of the village stood the wooden one-story banya. It was open all day on Saturdays, and it was separated: one side for men and another one for women. Families walked to the banya from every corner of the village carrying in their hands metal basins, dry sauna whisks, bags filled with all the toiletry, clean clothes and towels.
Everybody knew each other. Women would chat while washing themselves and their children. Once in a while someone would throw a bucket of water on the hot coil that was burning in the giant stove to get more steam. Women would leave their clothes in the changing room where locks did not exist.