Spring, as in cleaning

In spring, a young man's fancy may turn to love, but this woman's has never turned to the proverbial "spring cleaning." I clean as the urge comes along--or company's coming.

However, we're having the outside of our house painted and the storm windows have had to come off. They do so from the interior and all my rooms have had storm windows, top, bottom and screen, sitting beside the real thing. I realized the value of the storm windows when the temps went into the 20s while they were removed.

Two of my rooms consist mainly of windows. One has 4 windows and two doors, one solid wall. The other has 7 windows, two doors, an interior window to the bathroom and no solid wall. Needless to say, those two rooms were virtually unusable while the furniture and detritus were pushed to the center of the room so the windows could be reached.

The storm windows went back up Friday. Guess what I did yesterday?

It took 7 1/2 hours to not only restore order but to clean out. I started in one corner and went through books, loose papers, files, memorabilia. I dusted and vacuumed where no vacuum had been in a while. I gleaned 5 large bags of trash, 4 bags for the secondhand store, 5 boxes of books to give to the library/used book store, a bag of things for the grandchildren and 4 boxes for the attic.

I slept well last night. Whew! And I'm not going to do it again for a long time.