Spring is a time of new beginnings. In fact, the season brings new birth, blooms and lime green leaves on evergreen trees. At my house we have buds on our azaleas and our chickens’ egg production has doubled. Yes, even if we have one more dip in temperature, the new season is amongst us.
Spring cleaning is just one traditional phrase we use which reaches back to the old days of heating homes during the winter with wood and coal. Mid nineteenth century home keepers, I read recently, cleaned everything inside the house, including scrubbing walls and pulling up carpets from tack to remove dirt and soot from winter fires. After this ritual they prepared for the rest of the year: tilling, planting, harvesting, slaughtering, sheering, weaving, filling the pantry and smokehouse.
In today’s modern times, when we think of spring cleaning we picture ourselves having garage sales, maybe cleaning windows, baseboards, and fluffing our pillows (or replacing them), and area rugs. Some may include re-organizing cabinets and closets, buying more rubber bins and a new labeling tool, and purchasing new linens. What a difference 150 years makes.
We live without laborious tasks like tilling our gardens pulled by a mule (there wasn’t such a thing as Roundup), and having a single heating source to gather around to keep warm. If we lived 150 years ago the pantry’s stock would be low by mid-March so potatoes would be made into starch for ironing and winter’s accumulation of fats would be made into soap. Seed would be sewn for an early summer harvest. One thing is for certain. Back then they didn’t work on the Sabbath. Which was smart because if you read historical records, they needed the break. We have so much to be thankful for and yet we still complicate our lives enough to think back and say to ourselves, “If we only lived in the good old days. Things were simpler then.” Indeed.
A friend of mine recently showed me her handwritten calendar saying she can’t do it all and gasped. I certainly sympathized with her plight. Sometimes time gets away and items on our springtime to-do list shuffle further down than we’d like. Even though we have many time-saving gadgets to help our plight it seems they further complicate our lives. Back in my grandmother’s day coffee percolated on the stove and took at least ten to fifteen minutes if the stove was hot. Imagine waiting on that first cup of coffee. Imagine stoking a fire inside the stove and keeping it going throughout the day, every day. What a concept.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Spring cleaning then, now