Start your season with a clean slate

This is the time of year for traditional spring cleaning. There is a fall cleanup, but things are usually put away, so storing rather than discarding tends to be the norm. Spring is the legitimate clean-up. After the dead of winter, springtime screams renewal, a new start, getting rid of what isn’t needed. In our North American consumer-driven mindset, getting rid of something, ironically, may also involve buying something new to replace something broken or out of date. Garden tools and accessories (such as flower pots) are one such example.

This is a four-season economy, and buying never really stops (nor does the throwing out). An endless dance of buying, throwing out, buying, then throwing out. It doesn’t help that things aren’t as well made today. I have garden shovels that belonged to my grandfather, but I also have tools I’ve recently purchased that are already showing signs of age or have ceased to function.

Spring cleaning touches on three main areas: inside; outside; then another kind of inside.

Inside

The first is house cleaning. This involves window cleaning, and opening the windows to let fresh air in, after being closed all winter. I knew a woman who, when she was a child, liked to keep her bedroom window just slightly open all year around, even in winter. Sometimes her mother would come into her room in the morning and find her still sound asleep with a thin layer of snow on her blanket.

Opening the windows in the spring not only brings in fresh air but is an action signaling warmer weather has arrived.

Once windows are open, next is looking around and figuring out what needs keeping, what needs discarding.

Garbage collectors probably hate spring because more garbage is thrown out, but one person’s garbage could be another’s treasure. Easy pickings for someone who might see it as something useful.

Discarding might include something that could have been thrown out last fall but wasn’t. Spring cleaning is really cleaning, not simply losing a self-debate, then giving in and deciding to ultimately keep something.

Outside

A second spring cleaning doesn’t happen within the home but rather outside. That messy yard, especially after April’s mini-ice storm with its tree pruning, broken tree branch-cutting, and leaves you neglected the previous fall. Thinking and planning what to plant in the garden once the garden (if you have one) is ready for planting is also part of the process.

Outside spring cleaning is closely related, whether you like it or not, to curb appeal. Nothing improves the appearance of a house more than a well-kept outside. The dilemma of having a nice outside lawn and garden though is that the work never ends until the snow flies again.

Curb appeal isn’t an easy job; it requires a great deal of work (by someone).

And another kind of inside

A third spring cleaning may or may not appeal, or even relate, to you my dear reader. Again, this is inside cleaning, but it’s not inside your home; it’s inside of you!

Spring is a great time for introspective spiritual cleansing and self-improvement. This could involve reassessing your life or even going in another direction. Taking a course on something that you’re interested in or even, in the extreme, thinking of going back to school permanently and getting a medical degree, or whatever. Spring is a new frontier. Self-improvement can be as important and as rewarding as home improvement.

The word spring, in its mechanical interpretation, is something that goes forward, in an elastic manner; it’s propelling and potentially positive. It’s movement. Spring cleaning is renewal. It’s necessary, and it might even make you feel good.

Spring cleaning could also be viewed as an accomplishment, no matter how trivial you might think that it is.