Cleaning House

 T's* View
 I like a clean house just as much as anyone else does, and even though I try to keep mine at least "surface clean" all the time, there's always that nagging feeling that I'm not doing a thorough enough job with the little time I have to devote to it. The windows, the drapes, the floors, the rugs—cleaning them always seems to be put on hold. Likewise for closets, drawers, attic and cellar, under the couch and behind the piano. As for "things that accumulate," keeping up with that is a 24-hour a day job in itself. Anyway, with spring coming, I had just about decided to do a thorough cleaning job real soon—you know, the whole "spring cleaning" bit—when I saw something in the paper which said that research has found FALL is actually the best time to do your housecleaning. Well! Should I disregard the modern findings or should I be an old fuddy-duddy and insist on "the old way." - As it is, I've always been trying to figure out when was the best time of year to clean house. It can't be winter, when everyone comes in with snow on their boots and the kids come in with wet clothes about six times a day, allowing for changes into dry clothes every hour or so. I don't know how other families cope with the problem, but it seems I always have wet boots, gloves, hats and scarves piled around the heating units. Newspaper under the wet things only leaves its ink marks on the linoleum, and I'll be darned if I scrub the kitchen floor every time there's snow on the ground. Then there's mud season in the spring, when instead of tracking snow into the house it's mud that's brought in on the soles of shoes. (Yes, we have a doormat—two, in fact—but I think everyone skips right over them.) And it's not really warm enough yet to wash windows. Then I figure if I can't do the windows, what's the point of cleaning the curtains and drapes? Once summertime comes, it will be the perfect time to do a thorough housecleaning. On second thought, though, once summertime comes it's awfully hot—and besides, you can't really open the windows long enough to wash them because all the insects will come flying into the house. And if you wash the floors and clean the rugs, they'll only be covered with sand when the kids get home from the beach. So I guess they know what they're talking about when they say fall is the best time for house-cleaning. The kids are back in school, the insects are dying off, so you can have the windows open without screens, and the ground isn't muddy or snow covered. (But what about all those dead leaves that stick to the shoes after a heavy rain?) Could it be that there really is no best time to house-clean and that the job really wasn't meant to be done at all? I mean, after all, if God meant us to clean house, wouldn't He have made a season appropriate for it?
*Terri the Typesetter
T–Views Week of March 18, 1984