Tuesday is ironing day in Lucille Bline’s house.
It’ll happen in the kitchen: Just Lucille, her ironing board, her bed sheets and her refrigerator, covered top-to-bottom in family photos.
When it’s time, she’ll remove each image one by one to clean the surface beneath, and then will put them all back on.
“I like to clean,” Bline said.
As a matter of fact, she does a chore each day.
“If I didn’t, they might get ahead of me and then what am I going to do?” she said. “Every time I sit down anymore I fall asleep!”
Born on Aug. 23, 1926, Bline has a milestone birthday approaching: She’ll officially be a centenarian, making her part of an exclusive club.
For every 10,000 people in the United States, there are just two centenarians among them, according to a 2020 special report from the United States Census Bureau.
But, her age doesn’t define her. At almost 100 years old, she has a Facebook and still lives on her own, with a little bit of help.
“I went out the front door and my daughter told me, ‘Don’t go outside, mother, because it’s windy,’” she recounted about a blustery spring day. “I went out anyhow to see about getting the mail and when I did, the door flew out of my hand. The mail flew out of my hand and the door came back and hit me in the ribs and down on the porch I went. I crawled out there in the yard, to get the mail ‘cause it was gonna go blow away. And so I got it and brought it back in the house and oh, I did fracture or did something–”
“Broke her rib,” her grandson Rob Burchard and his wife Heather chimed in.
“I didn’t break any, thank heavens, but it’s still sore,” Bline added, “And so after that, my daughter said ‘Mother, you need help.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t need help, just takes me a little bit longer to do things.’”
Despite that, her daughter still got her help. Bline now has at-home support that visits her on Mondays to help with laundry in the basement of her home.
“It’s so I won’t go up and down the basement stairs,” Bline said. “But that’s what keeps me young!”
Then of course, Tuesday is ironing day, which she tries to get done in the morning, but she ran behind this Tuesday because she watered her flowers.
“Don’t let her fool you,” Heather said. “We take her out hiking and we go tulip picking!”
On Wednesdays, a woman comes to take Bline to the grocery store and to get her hair done. Wednesday has always been hair day, Rob said.
And on Fridays, another person comes to help with cleaning the bathrooms.
But it’s not just the schedule that keeps Bline happy into her late 90s.
She likes to watch westerns – Gunsmoke is her favorite – and she plays solitaire on the computer in her office. Card games are something she played throughout her whole life, with her family growing up and then with her husband and friends.
Photos of Bline with her sister and her mother. 
Bline digs through a photo album containing photos and mementos from her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. 
Lucille Bline digs through a photo album containing photos and mementos from her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. 
Bline flips through a photo album containing photos and mementos from her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. 
Bline looks through a photo album containing photos and mementos from her childhood in the 1920s and 1930s.
Rob grabbed the photo album of black and white pictures her mother kept of Bline’s childhood in the 1920s and the 1930s. Rob grabbed it off a high shelf using Bline’s ladder that he wishes she would stop using.
“That’s the one thing they can’t take out of my house — it’s my ladder,” Bline said.
She put on her special reading glasses and flipped through, telling stories of how she would decorate her bike and join her father in the Labor Day parade and visiting the Pennsylvania Turnpike when she was younger.
“Where’d you go on the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” Rob asked her.
“We went to Pennsylvania,” she sarcastically responded.
She used to collect stamps with her sister, and still continues to collect them in a book. They would also go to the Midland Theater in Newark every Sunday, a tradition she continued with her husband, Fred.
“When we got married, you had to be 21 and I was 21 and he was 20. So his mother and dad had to sign for him so he could get married…But I said, ‘I could go and raise him the way I wanted to!’”
They were high school sweethearts and were married for over 70 years before he passed away at the age of 93 in 2021.
When they were first married, Bline worked at The Newark Advocate in the accounting and payroll departments. But, she left after they adopted their daughters Cindy and Linda. Looking back on her life, she says her daughters are what she’s most proud of.
“That’s the most precious thing in my whole life.”
At this point in her life, Bline misses three people most of all: Fred, her sister, and her daughter, Cindy, who died after a battle with cancer in 2019. She still honors them every year at the butterfly release at the Davis-Shai House. This year, she bought 20 butterflies for her family to release.
She’s grateful she has lived so long because she saw many things she would not have. She met her first great-great grandchild, saw her daughter turn 70, and was even able to attend Heather and Rob’s wedding. But, it’s hard for her to believe that she will be 100 soon.
“I don’t understand why I’m still here!,” she said with a laugh. “I just can’t believe I’m going to be 100!”
Her advice for people wanting to live as long as her is simple: “Do things right and stay out of trouble.”
Halla Emmons writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.