Spring Cleaning a Hutterite Colony (And Why the Fire Truck Comes Out)

There is a serving wagon in our kitchen with four small wheels on it. Twice a year we take those wheels off — not to fix them, but to clean the axle, the inside of the wheel, and the piece of floor the wheel was standing on. Nothing is wrong with it. Nobody will ever look. I am the head cook on a colony of a hundred and fifty people in southern Alberta. In this video I explain what happens the two weeks a year when every building on this place is taken apart: what the word "everything" means here, what happens on the one morning a year the women take over the room that belongs to the men, the rule about food that sounds like a joke and is not one — and at the end, the reason I think we do this when we do it, which nobody here has ever said out loud and which may be nothing more than my own reading. My husband Andreas keeps the books on this colony. His channel is linked below. SOURCES · Adina Walter, a Hutterite woman, filming her own colony's spring cleaning — the kitchen schedule, the stainless steel, the wagon wheels, the coffee shop, the fire truck · Hutterites.org — colony structure, daily and weekly work, beliefs · Communion taken by all baptised members on the day after Easter — Hutterite religious practice, everyculture.com · Tim Smith, documentary photography of Deerboine Colony, Manitoba — the division of work between women and men · Hutterite population census, 2024 — 58,392 people, 544 colonies The connection I draw at the end between the cleaning and communion is mine, not doctrine. I say so in the video. If you know better, I would genuinely like to hear it. If you find an error, put it in the comments and I will pin the correction. I would rather be right than look right.