Spring Cleaning - Sundry Samples from Literature

For many the recent changes have spelt bouts of spring cleaning. In fact, given the nature of the thing, cleanliness is encouraged. It is in that spirit that I recently chose Spring Cleaning as theme for Writer Rites. These days deep cleaning your living spaces has almost reached a philosophy of life. People scramble to declutter and to adopt minimalist lifestyles. But what was it like in earlier times? 

Imagining the Bounds of History gives us a glimpse of Spring Cleaning in the 19th Century.

A manual for young housekeepers provided these instructions for spring cleaning in 1869.

Were you, reader, some day in spring, generally in the week before Easter, to take a walk through villages which we know, you might be ready to suppose that a general emigration was contemplated. You would see chairs and tables, kneading-toughs and cradles, bedsteads and bedding, all put out for an airing, while the busy cottagers are scrubbing and whitewashing, and perhaps painting and papering within doors. Neither is the practice confined to the poorer class only….

Things have indeed changed over time. Even in my own lifetime. From brooms to microfibre mops we've come a long way, baby! Of course, spring cleaning is never meant to be Bean's way:

 

But, jokes apart, spring cleaning has generated fiction. Here is a short story about what happens when a daughter and granddaughter try to give an older lady’s home a makeover while she’s in hospital. 

“Right,” says my mother, as we drive out of the hospital car park. “Now’s our chance to get to work on that bungalow.”

Even with both eyes fixed on the road, she must notice my alarm, because she takes her left hand off the wheel and places it on my knee and says, in that wheedling what-do-I-ever-ask-of-you tone, “Come on, Emma. If we do it together we’ll have that place bottomed in no time.”

Home from Uni for the Easter holidays, I’m supposed to be churning out an essay on the English civil war. I’m supposed to be searching for a McJob to tame my overdraft, or hanging out in the pub with friends I haven’t seen since Christmas. Unfortunately, what I’m supposed to be doing is of no consequence to my mother. Set against one of her projects, any plans of mine turn out to be as flimsy as cobwebs.

 Spring Cleaning

 

However dull it may seem to spend time brushing away cobwebs, spring cleaning can also be poetic. Marilyn Nelson's poem Dusting says 

Thank you for these tiny 

particles of ocean salt, 

pearl-necklace viruses,

winged protozoans: 

for the infinite, 

intricate shapes 

of submicroscopic 

living things.