They’re everywhere — handy reminders from e-mail newsletters, magazine articles, my mother in law, and the Perfect Bus Stop Mommy: “Spring flowers are blooming, the sun is shining…Time to clean!”
Who picked the pollen polluted air of spring as prime window washing time? And if it’s so beautiful outside, why am I supposed to spend an entire weekend cleaning out cabinets, closets, and dryer vents?
Who makes these rules — The Domestic Guilt Fairy? I have a good friend who’s chronically plagued by the Domestic Guilt Fairy. For the sake of our friendship, I’ll call her Fred. Fred finds nothing wrong with spending half a Sunday scrubbing the grout in her guest bathroom even when it’s the first sunny day of spring.
After a long pasty white skinned winter indoors, I’ll pull weeds in my back yard and the neighbor’s yard before I’ll stay inside. Yesterday, Fred’s kids and hunky husband were outside blissfully playing. Fred wandered over to my weed patch and sighed, “I should be washing windows. Shouldn’t I? What do you think?”
“That you’re insane. Can you step a bit to the left? You’re blocking my sun.”
I wonder where these women’s magazine writers live while they’re composing their “expert” advice articles on spring cleaning closets. If I stored all my winter clothes in breathable bags with homemade organic herb and cedar sachets, I’d freeze to death a week later. Where I live it can be 80 one day and 42 the next. For an entire season. Besides, my dogs ate all my cedar blocks.
The experts say to change the batteries in my smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Don’t they know that’d require me to actually search for batteries? Which might lead to cleaning out one of those famous drawers or closets, keeping my pasty white skin and me from being outside.
I’d also have to unearth the ladder from behind the outdoor Christmas decorations shoved in the corner of the garage. That would lead to an emergency garage cleaning which, although semi outdoors, is not technically and fully outdoors, therefore less desirable than pulling the neighbor’s weeds.
Spring is the time I’m supposed to dry clean, launder, and store all my winter blankets and sweaters. Hellooo? I just paid $3.95 for this magazine and now I’m supposed to spend 25 bucks per blanket and $7.50 per sweater? Can’t I just douse them with fabric freshener and shove them in the hall closet with the bags of unsorted photos, broken vacuum cleaner parts, and Easter baskets?
Of course, Fred would never do that. The Domestic Guilt Fairy wouldn’t let her. Fred stayed indoors last weekend scrapbooking her spring break vacation photos. I admit I’d love to have my photos organized at a slightly higher level than paper grocery bags, but I told the Domestic Guilt Fairy to fly over my house some other day.
Like next winter. When we’re snowed in.
Karen Rinehart is a newspaper humor columnist, public speaker, and the creator of The Bus Stop Mommies™. She is also author of Invisible Underwear, Bus Stop Mommies and Other Things True To Life. You can read more of her work at karenrinehart.net. Karen lives in Concord, North Carolina with her two kids, one husband and goofball dog, where they attend St. James Catholic Church. (Well, they leave the dog at home.) She enjoys hearing from readers across the States and as far away as Australia, Japan and England.
