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Syndicate
Apr
07
| A Clean Sweep |
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| Monday, 07 April 2008 | |
Lisa Sussman, NNN's Natural Mom, finds that earth-friendly spring cleaning inside your house can also help clear out those cobwebs inside your head.
The days are getting longer. The birds are back with their morning serenade. The daffs are poking their heads out of the ground. Despite the weather forecast, spring is officially here. And just as the animals begin cleaning out their dens after months of hibernation, my family starts our annual ritual of spring cleaning.
 "Beware the Ides of March." I do. Early spring is our chore season. Daylight savings means that I can now see dust bunnies that have been breeding like, well, rabbits, all winter long under the furniture and in sharp corners. The new slant of light streaming through the windows is marred by a Rorschach blot of fingerprints. The spiders have constructed their version of I-95 throughout my house, connecting lamps to picture frames to touristy chatkes of the Eiffel tower and the Golden Gate Bridge with an intricate web.
It is time to sweep it all clean.
But I also feel the pull of the outdoors. The wind has an undercurrent of warmth, a promise of sunnier days. The trees are beginning to adorn themselves in their spring finery. There are hints of color everywhere and you can even hear the occasional dozy buzz of a yellow jacket queen emerging from her lonely winter vigil. I nest in my bed, buried under down and consider the alternatives: go outside and look for spring, or do the windows.
The longed-for warmer weather also means that everything loosens up. Terra no longer so firma underfoot. My heart pitter-patters with the anticipation of sorting through my seeds, planning my garden, working the soil. But meanwhile, the kids and cats are tracking in mud, leaves and unspeakable green slop that I don’t want to know the origins of. Heaps of damp mittens mound up in the mudroom, creating a smell that is anything but spring-like. I mop up only to have the crew stampede in and out again. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Because I grew up in an all-white house, I learned the power of bleach at an early age. Smudges on the floor? Crayon marks on the wall? Soap scum on the bathroom tiles? Make them vanish with a rag dipped in Clorox. It was a wild war against filth that the all of the mothers waged daily. Soil was never something to plant seeds in: it was dirt, and it had to get out of the house. Instead of inhaling sweet, scented breezes, and surrendering to seasonal tides, we children were taught to neutralize the giddy verdant feelings with ammonia in the constant community quest to get surfaces to "sparkle." After the annual spring clean, everyone from the youngest to the oldest was enlisted to stand grouchy guard against dust for the rest of the season.
Little did we know that our family’s all-powerful secret recipe of a cup of ammonia (“perfect for getting rid of rust stains”) and a shot of bleach (“kill those germs”) was actually a military formula for making chlorine gas, a caustic mixture used as a weapon during World War I.
I no longer use bleach in my assault against dirt. Now I mix up various gentle blends of white distilled vinegar, vegetable-based soap, lemon juice, baking powder, hydrogen peroxide and elbow grease (click here for non-toxic recipes). I take comfort in knowing not only am I cleaning my house, I am cleaning the earth. Still, a small part of me worries whether my nontoxic approach would get my mother’s stamp of approval - after all, how can my blend of vinegar and water make the windows sparkle when it’s not blue?
But one cleaning tradition remains the same in my house - as my mother did before me and her mother did before her and, probably back to when the Sussman mothers were sweeping out our cave dwellings with mammoth hair brushes, I enlist the help of my children in cleaning.
Luckily, the things I hate to do are the most fun for them. So they swoop through the rooms dusting radiators and chair rails, pretending to be airplanes landing on the runways. Their tiny hands are the perfect size for wiping all the knickknacks that seem to have colonized every room. Cleaning mirrors is a good opportunity to make funny faces at each other with no hurt feelings. I warn to no avail against the hazards of spraying too much of the vinegar and water – besides the streaks, your house begins to smell like fish and chips.
I used to backtrack their efforts, surreptitiously wiping missed grime and dust. But a recent article in Science Daily warning against the dangers of overdoing spring cleaning has loosened my vigilance. You actually can make yourself sick by being too clean. There is value in bacteria and building up immunity via exposure. This is my kind of advice!
So now I have a new attitude toward spring cleaning. Instead of dusting the shelves and sifting through the closets for unwanted clothes, I clean the cobwebs from my mind and sort through my beliefs about my family and myself, of who we are and why we do things. I mend broken friendships, wash away old and useless thought and clean up my schedule.
My house may not sparkle (sorry, Mom!), but my family life is certainly brighter. And there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that we’re leaving the earth a slightly cleaner place too.
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