I've been cleaning

My mother didn't seem to like spring cleaning, but I do. I love opening the windows and chasing the staleness out, and cleaning nooks and crannies that haven't been cleaned in a while, and shaking rugs, and I like finding a thing or two or three to send to the thrift store just to feel like I've shed something.

As part of the latest push, I cleaned a blanket we use while sitting in the recliner, and towels I use as seat covers on the dining room chairs. We have cats, you see. I hadn't quite noticed how much hair they'd shed recently, much less how much of that hair had stuck itself to that blanket and those towels. But how much fresher the house seems, with everything from the dining room/sitting room freshly clean. So now I'm tracking down other places that got hairy or dirty while I wasn't looking, and tending to them.

I'm having fun while I'm doing it. Like I said, I like spring cleaning. I do. It's an easy way to feel victorious, I guess. ;-)

OK, correction, it's a relatively easy way to feel victorious. It does take some elbow grease and ingenuity to do a good job of it. But, of course, if it didn't there wouldn't be nearly as much to feel triumphant about. :-)

And, of course, afterwards, the house is always more pleasant to live in, which is reward enough in itself, I think.

Of late, I've been opening doors and windows during those spring minutes and hours that pop up, and reluctantly closing them again when colder air blasts through. Open. Close. Open. Close.

I'd like to report that I'm very good at this, but I'm not. A week or so ago, the first day that seemed likely, I opened the front door and the biggest back window in the house. No sooner had the breeze gotten going than the outside temperature dropped something like twenty degrees. It does that around here sometimes. I closed the front door, but left the back window open partway. Sometimes the temperature jumps around here, too, after all. But it didn't get warmer, as hoped (not even slowly, incrementally, no matter how patiently I waited). When I got too cold to stand it anymore in my office I went to close the window, and caught my husband and the cats hovering around the Toyo (our oil heating stove), trying to will more heat out of it.

Oops.

My husband thought it was funny, by the way. And the cats forgave me after I played with them for a while.

There are reasons homemaking is considered an art instead of a science, yes?