Cleaning

We feel the irresistible urge to clean twice a year, spring and fall. We may feel cleaning urges more frequently, but I’d guess most of us find them easier to stave off. But the major changes of season really bring out the nesting urge.

Back when I hoped to land the job of novelist/cartoonist/house husband, I devoted myself to housework. Unfortunately, I’m not very creative in the kitchen. What I consider creative in the kitchen most other people classify as criminally insane. That leaves me with only a few safe, bland meals to cook over and over. So I threw myself into the cleaning.

Laundry never piled up. I vacuumed at least once a week. I even tried to dust. And I did my poor best, for a while, to put some sort of meal on the table in the evenings, at least until I received word that I needed to start earning more of my keep in the outside world. Supper then became a ritual of guilt, blame, disappointment and macaroni and cheese.

Still I cleaned, hoping that this would compensate for my other inadequacies, as a chef and best-selling author. It helped that the house was a tiny shack.
Eventually the marriage fell apart under a number of stresses, but by damn the house was clean.

My model was an ex-girlfriend’s mother, whose house was not fancy, but was as clean as you hope an operating room will be. The stove still looked new, despite the creditable meals that had issued forth from it. After supper, the kitchen would be cleaned, the dishes all washed, everything scrubbed sparkling.

Yes, it sounds obsessive, but I was impressed. I knew it was beyond the power of an ordinary mortal to maintain such a standard, but at least I had an ideal. I tried to imagine what she might say if she had a flat tire out front and happened to drop in to use the phone, a highly unlikely circumstance given how far away she lived.

“I was right about you never amounting to much, but you’ve got the cleaning thing down,” she might say.

Then again, probably not.

I’ve fallen from those Olympian aspirations since my house grew and my spouse changed. Neither of us feels really motivated to chase down all the hairballs produced by a cat population that has now grown to five, or the relentless tide of sand that comes in on everyone’s shoes. The continental ice sheet slept here, 15,000 years ago or so, and it left all this sand and gravel lying around.

Fall comes. Clean the chimney. Stack the wood. Clean the windows that have hung open all summer collecting spider webs. Too soon we will have to shut those windows for a few months. If they’re smeared and silk-veiled, that’s what we’ll look through until spring.

In the spring, a winter’s worth of dirt and another collection of cobwebs will await banishment into the flower-scented air. But that’s another project for another season.