cleaning house

(And I mean it literally, not figuratively, though there may be some figurative psychological benefits).

I did my spring-cleaning yesterday afternoon. I get done with classes around noon on Fridays. I gave an exam in one class so I did have that to grade (got done around 2). And then I started cleaning.

When I'm in the right mood for it, I enjoy cleaning house. There's always the inertia to be overcome ("I could be sitting reading right now!") but once I get into it, I can keep going.

I clean (in the sense of sweeping floors and wiping down counters) every couple days, but the bigger-clean - the moving furniture to sweep under it, the putting-away-of-papers-and-magazines, that only happens every couple weeks. As does the mopping of kitchen and bathroom floors. (I have white ceramic tile floors in both rooms. If I had a time machine, I'd go back in time to the person who owned the house before me - and had the tile put in - and yell at them for doing that. White ceramic tile is very hard to keep clean for long, unless you're willing to go all Adrian Monk and scrub after every cooking event. Which I am not.)

So anyway: I had lots of magazines accumulated, lots of mail (I tend to be paranoid about saving things like the statements from bills after I've paid them; I'm always afraid my account won't be credited and I will need to somehow reconstruct my payment records of the past 2 years so they don't turn my electricity off or something). Grotty kitchen floor (I cooked more this week than I often do; when I am distressed I sometimes cook as a displacement behavior).

So I just buckled down and cleaned. And it felt good. I turned the radio on (A semi-local talk station where the hosts are less frothy - left OR right - than most other stations, and then later the afternoon news. Sadly, there are NO "good" music stations here, at least "good" in my sense. There are music stations that play "both kinds of music*" in the Blues Brothers sense).

(*Barmaid: "We have both kinds of music here: Country AND Western!" Heh. One of my favorite lines out of a movie from which I can quote MANY lines)

But it felt good. It felt like scraping off barnacles. It felt like a purification ritual. (I wonder - does the tradition of spring cleaning in any way hark back to old religious purification rituals? I also wonder - does anyone really DO spring cleaning any more, or is it a concept that went out with rug-beaters?)

One of the things I like about cleaning house is that it leaves the thinking part of my brain largely unoccupied, while keeping the worrying part (or parts very close to it) occupied with making decisions like "keep or pitch?" or "authentically scrub or just use one of those cheapo Swiffer Wet things on this floor?"

I find that I start to get nervous and unhappy when my house is not clean. I am restless when I am at home. I think part of it - but only part - is deep down I'm afraid that someone - my minister (who probably wouldn't care), one of the ladies from my women's group, someone I teach with - would drop by and see my Horribly Messy House and then I'd be embarrassed and mortified that I can't even keep my house neat - that I would feel I had Failed as a Grownup because my house is a pit.

(Like I said: the people who really matter probably wouldn't care and I was at a colleague's house once for a dinner party and his house was less neat than mine generally is. So maybe my standards are a bit unrealistic).

Also - oddly enough, I am not bothered that my work-office is a mess. In fact, it is somewhat of a joke in the department - my office is the messiest and yet I am the one person who can generally find ANYTHING she needs in her office right away (My "filing system" is strongly based on spatial memory: I can remember where I put something as long as I am not moving too many things around at the same time. Hence, after I clean my office, I generally can't find ANYTHING for a couple weeks.)

I suspect it's because I don't see my work office as being so intimate a part of me - so much a reflection of who I am - as my home is. My office is just where I work; my home is, on some level, who I am. And I don't want people to think that I am disordered and slovenly.

Anyway. I felt my mood lift as I swept and scrubbed and did away with old papers I don't need any more, and put things back into their proper place (and did laundry at the same time, and then put that away). Having things put away where they are supposed to be is a certain satisfying feeling for me.

And so, now my house is clean. My house always feels bigger after it's cleaned, and it feels more peaceful and quiet to me.

I'm sure the larger part of my distress over a messy house is do to some psychologically distracting effect of clutter and dust; I am more productive when my house is clean and I am happier. Last night I sat on the sofa and knitted after the house was clean and I felt very happy and peaceful indeed.

Some of my friends keep telling me: you need to get a cleaning woman. You work hard, you make good money - get someone else to do those chores for you.

And you know? I can't. I just can't. Part of it is that I read the book "Other People's Dirt" (a series of rather snarky essays by a woman who cleaned houses - she was VERY judgemental of her clients and that was one thing that bothered me about the book.) I don't like the thought of someone going through my underwear drawer (perhaps) or looking at my stores of quilt fabric or my many shelves of books and shaking her head and dismissing me with a short four-or-five letter word.

I also don't like the idea of making someone else clean my mess. That's the bigger part of it. Growing up, my mom and dad did all the stuff around the house. They did the cleaning and the painting and the yardwork and my dad did some of the basic car-maintenance stuff (I know how to change the oil in a car but I do not; that is one thing I'm willing to leave to people I pay). Part of it was, I think, my parents are basically frugal about things it's easy to be frugal about. (They were frugal, yes, but when Christmas or our birthdays rolled around, then they spent the money they had saved on mowing the lawn themselves to buy my brother or me the very thing we wanted most...) And I think I've picked up that attitude: I save money on things like laundry (I know someone who sends his shirts out: I'm sure it's very nice but that's not something I could spend money on) so I can spend what I save on books. Or craft supplies. Or plants, when gardening season rolls around.

But I also think there's something spiritually good for me about the action of cleaning. It's almost like a little exorcism: I may feel that the outside world is disordered and screwed up, but dangit, at least the pots and pans in my cupboard are in a straight line and are ordered from smallest to largest. (I am not generally that OCD about things but I like my kitchen to be ship-shape). Getting the dirt and dust out is like getting the accumulated dust of the week out of my soul. (Perhaps that is also why I usually choose a Friday afternoon for my "big cleaning"). I feel lighter and brighter after the cleaning is done, more ready to face the coming week.

In general, I tend to think that it's good for people who don't do manual labor as a part of their job to do some kind - be it cleaning their own house, or gardening, or building houses for Habitat for Humanity - on their off time. It brings balance. And I think there is something potentially humbling about it - like, I may have a Ph.D., but I still have to go home and scrub the toilet. And I think that's a good thing for me, too.


It brings happiness to have a clean house, but it's a different - quieter - sort of happiness.