There was wind, exacerbating the icy minus-11-degree Celsius temperature, but the month was getting on, and I decided to go out on Saturday afternoon to begin the door-to-door canvass on the street on behalf of the Ontario March of Dimes. Another fund-raising campaign for charity I couldn't bring myself to refuse assisting. Although who designed the month of January for such an event couldn't possibly be someone who would have to slog through snowy and icy streets to present as a volunteer canvasser.

Most people are unfamiliar with the work of the March of Dimes. Originally a charitable group that came into being to cope with an epidemic of polio among children, it now provides prostheses, wheelchairs and other medical devices to children in need of them, suffering from the effects of cancer and other debilitating diseases, that strike them in childhood. There are, admittedly, other public and private agencies, particularly at the municipal level that focus on the same needs, but perhaps the greater number of such sources the better for society as a whole.

Because most people don't see it as a high profile need they don't respond. So I received quite a number of disinterested turn-aways. Still, a decent number of our neighbours agreed to part with some of their cash or through cheques, to make a donation. One of them, is a young mother of two toddlers, three and one, and we spoke of children and household duties as we often do when we meet, though my experience reflecting hers took place a half-century before.

Although women have a very difficult time balancing time and energy and concerns between raising children, household chores and paid work outside the home, they do have the advantage of technological advances in domestic chores. Despite which, I still wonder how they manage to do what they obviously are able to manage. They are hugely exhausted, as a result of such Herculean efforts to be a loving, emotionally supportive mother with all the physical let alone mental work that inspires and requires, along with being a part of the wage-earning workforce.

I described for her what it was like for me a half-century earlier, having three infants in diapers all at the same time - cloth diapers that required daily laundering, not the paper disposables used today. Washed with a wringer-washer, and hung out to dry in all weather. We laughed, and compared the differences in household management, then and now. At that time commercial babyfood didn't crowd the shelves of supermarkets, and mothers prepared a lot of their own food for their babies, after breastfeeding - although truth to tell even back then it was more common to give babies formula milk than breastfeed, though I did. On the other hand, even with all the new and cleverly-designed household management equipment, the chores never end.

The comfortable leisure of the future that was once predicted and hailed for liberating women from unceasing responsibilities and chores never did materialize. For with the greater ease that chores can now be accomplished with we have hampered ourselves with more possessions and more distractions and more things that must be tended to.