With that blizzard last week having reminded us who is really in charge, it is now spring housecleaning time.

For that, mama was in charge, and the whole family pitched in.

It was my springtime job to haul all of the old, rolled-up rugs, as limp as wet gunny sacks, to the clothesline.

I draped them over a couple of parallel wires, and they looked like square-sided, headless prehistoric monsters.

I’d flog them to within inches of what was left of their warp and their weft. The dust really flew.

Rug flogging in the neighborhood was a violent time of the year. You could hear the “whomp-whomp” of a dozen backyard rug beaters at work. The flailing sounded like a flight of Huey helicopters coming in for a hot-zone landing.

There were tools for flogging, something like giant eggbeaters, but kids where I lived used their baseball bats to pound away on winter’s accumulation of dust residing in those slab-sided dinosaurs.

Spring housecleaning involved more than the rugs, of course. Storm windows had to be removed and screens installed.

Cupboards were emptied, cleaned and re-lined with paper. The list of chores was long. It might be a week before everything had been checked off.

Emily Dickinson pretty well agreed with me regarding spring cleaning. She wrote: “House is being cleaned. I prefer pestilence.”

Spring cleaning is now a thing of the past. Time has changed it, I suppose. There are fewer house-to-house drop-ins by neighbors, so people are no longer judged by the number and size of cobwebs in the distant corners of the living room, or by some undiscovered cat deposit dried in a neat little pile behind the davenport.

What I believe is a fairly recent change is the expectation now that shoes are removed at the entryway so as not to soil the carpet. I spent two years in Japan, where shoes have for centuries been removed before entering a home, but that’s because their shoes were made of wood and that raised hob with the straw tatami flooring.

Mr. Clean is now on scene, along with a cornucopia of other devices and mixtures smelling of lemons.

Fifty years ago, spring cleaning, as well as being a tradition, was necessary, because many houses were heated with wood, coal or kerosene that left a film on most everything.

Windows weren’t as well engineered. Dust found a way. Pets are mostly housebound now. They don’t drag home all of the neighborhood animal, vegetable and mineral flotsam and jetsam.

Some springs we replaced our linoleum kitchen countertops that were worn and burned in spots, or covered with knife nicks. Now we have marble tops.

Garbage didn’t magically disappear with a growl down the kitchen sink, but dribbled and splashed into a slop pail under the sink, carried periodically to the snorting hog out back.

Vacuum cleaners were only for the town’s financiers and fur buyers.

But in our neighborhood we had baseball bats, plenty of Babe Ruth wannabe’s, sturdy wire clothes lines and dozens of those dusty, dinosaur rugs.





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