Housekeeping is the maintenance of a cleanenvironment, usually in a house, but it also applies to industrial, commercial, and institutional settings. Repair and Maintenance is fixing any sort of mechanical or electrical device should it get out of order or broken (repair) as well as performing the routine actions which keep the device in working order (maintenance) or prevent trouble from arising (preventive maintenance). ... Clean can refer to: the Clean programming language Hygiene Cleanliness Clean (movie) (2004) Clean animals in the Bible This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... See also list of house types. ... Commercial may mean: as a noun: a form of advertising, as in a television commercial as an adjective: referring to commerce or for-profit activities or trade (compare with non-profit organization) a breed of cattle, Commercial This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that... An institution is a group, tenet, maxim, or organization created by a group of humans. ...
The term is also used in computer operating systems to refer to things such as deletion of unneeded temporary files or freeing computer memory, sometimes also called garbage collection. A common advice or maxim for a housekeeping methodology or rule of thumb is "Clean as you go". In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ... A file in a computer system is a stream (sequence) of bits stored as a single unit, typically in a file system on disk or magnetic tape. ... The terms storage (U.K.) or memory (U.S.) refer to the parts of a digital computer that retain physical state (data) for some interval of time, possibly even after electrical power to the computer is turned off. ... In computing, garbage collection (also known as GC) is a form of automatic memory management. ... Maxim may refer to: Hiram Maxim, inventor and firearm designer Maxim machine gun Joey Maxim, boxer, world light heavyweight champion Maxim, a mens magazine A maxim, a wise saying similar to an aphorism Maxim IC, manufacturer of analog and mixed signal integrated circuits Maxim Institute, a conservative think tank... The word Methodology is used in several ways. ... A rule of thumb is an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination. ...
Housekeeping is a novel written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson.
Ruth and her sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho (some details similar to Robinson's hometown, Sandpoint, Idaho).
The novel alludes to housekeeping, not in the domestic cleaning sense, but in the ephemeral task of keeping a spiritual home for one's self and one's family.