Spring! Spring! Spring! Clean?

Posted in Mom Stuff
by Lorain County Moms

I couldn’t stand it anymore. For any of you who have been happily afflicted by the knitting bug, you will understand that yarn begins to take over everything — your under-bed areas, your ottomen (that’s plural of ottoman in our house), your window seats and attics and worst of all, the office.

I’m a writer, and I have a (half) room of my own, but mostly I find I must run to the library, the Barnes & Noble with a cafe, the relative privacy of the kids’ swing-set platform to write new things. I need to be away from all those paper, plastic and tchotchke reminders of who I am and what I need to do — the $2 check for school pencils, the 16,000 camp forms, the Burt’s Bees hand cream, the tiny wooden house my husband gave me when we lived in San Francisco and were not yet married (look! he said. I’m giving you a house!). I love it all, and it’s good to get away from it, too.

At the same time, sometimes it’s heavenly to get rid of, to clean out, to remember and excavate. In response to my musing about building a studio over the garage, my husband cleaned out four huge shelves in the basement. “I think I just saved us about $500,000,” he said. “Now we don’t have to build an addition or move. You can put your yarn there.” Good man.

Once we started, though, we spend the weekend moving and cleaning and sorting. Old, very good toys to hand down to friends and nephew, an amazing box of maps now hardly ever mined in deference to Robota, our name for our GPS navigation system. But there were some fabulous memories, though — Point Reyes maps, Mount Washington trail maps (we kept the best stuff), maps from Mt. Laguna in San Diego, where we used to go cross-country skiing with the dog, then come back down and drive less than an hour home — to go to the beach.

My husband painted the fence (the third time in 11 years we’ve done it — whether it needed it (oh, it needed it) or not, we dug and planted a Square Foot Garden, I cleaned out the fridge (jam of ages), we moved extra copies of my three novels into a space in the basement where hopefully no silverfish will tread. So now here I am with a refreshed office, a refreshed sense of who I am and where I’ve been. I think maybe I’ll tackle the cabinets next. Though the file drawer could use some sorting. And the kids’ closets.

Or maybe I’ll just blog.

—By Gwendolen Gross, NEW JERSEY MOMS BLOG

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This is an original post from the New Jersey Moms Blog (http://www.newjerseymomsblog.com). Gwendolen Gross lives in northern New Jersey, where the daffodils have kissed the green and the tulips lipstick the rainy April. She writes novels when she isn’t cleaning her desk.

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