On most weekends, agriculture secretary really does clean house

WASHINGTON -- The Cabinet secretary was scrubbing his toilet, working white bristles around the rim, the sting of Clorox in his nostrils.

Chores. He makes a list on Saturday morning. Clean, wash bed, polish shoes, fertilize flowers, mow and trim, vacuum car, wash dog, sew on button . . .

By lunchtime, Mike Johanns, the US secretary of agriculture, has buffed, dusted, swept, and oiled upstairs and down in his suburban Arlington, Va., home. In the laundry room, he twirled a mop face-up, running his fingers across the terry cloth.

''It's really cool. Great to pick up dust," Johanns said. His bedspread was thumping in the dryer.

During the week, dressed in a black suit, Johanns runs a $94.7 billion department with 110,981 employees. On the weekend, his black suits lie in the back of his car -- drop off cleaning -- as he unwinds with old habits from the farm.

On the dairy farm in northern Iowa where Johanns grew up, he woke at 5 a.m., and he still does. He was 4 when his father gave him his first chore: holding the hose to fill the hog tanks. It was dark, cold, and his fingers stiffened inside two pairs of gloves. His parents milked cows, side by side.

''It was a very disciplined life," said Johanns, 55, touring his house, bending to pick up lint in the kitchen, to pluck a hair from a table in the den.

On the farm, Mike delivered piglets from their grunting mothers. He shoveled muck in the barn. Before school he'd wash his boots, but when his boots warmed up in the classroom, they smelled like manure.

After school, he did more chores. ''He relaxes very poorly," said Johanns's wife, Stephanie, as she crossed the parking lot with him at Safeway. She is smiling and confiding, a wink in her green eyes. Next to Stephanie, Johanns is mild. He is milk; she is honey. They met when they were both serving as county commissioners in Nebraska, before Johanns was elected governor. It is his second marriage.

''We don't do anything alone," Johanns said.

''Better when you do it with your best friend," Stephanie observed. She drives him to work on the way to her telecommunications job, handles his e-mail, and gives him cash because he doesn't have a checking account.

''I am his ATM, and he gets $20 a week, whether he needs it or not," she said.

On work days, they pack ham sandwiches and spend their half-hour lunch in his office.

On Saturdays, they grocery shop after they clean. ''He cleans constantly," Stephanie said, smiling. ''He gives me jobs; he says, 'OK, Steph, here's what you have to do. Do the counters.' When he was running for governor, if I was five minutes late getting home, he'd pull out the vacuum and start vacuuming."

Once, when the grocery bags were still on the counter, he unloaded the Windex and started spraying the windows. She laughed: ''He's a compulsive window washer. If we go on vacation, he washes strangers' windows."

At Safeway, an employee cut open a watermelon for Johanns to taste, unaware that the man licking juice from his fingers was the nation's top agricultural official.

They bought sugar-free Oreos. Later, in the parking lot, Johanns loaded the grocery bags. In their trunk lay a ''Welcome" mat. ''We are so daggone boring," Stephanie said.