Cleaning solutions
A new approach to an old springtime tradition
By Joanna Beresford 04/29/2010
My sister says our mother believed in spring cleaning as a religious rite, which makes sense, since the spring cleaning practice extends its rigorous roots back to Passover rituals and, according to some historians, other religiously nuanced beginnings.
For our formidable mother, however, the act of cleaning itself was a religion, albeit one with which she demonstrated fiercely ambivalent feelings. She perhaps thought that scrubbing floors and windows was a task fit for hired hands. But she couldn’t save herself from the fever of her own weekly attacks upon grit and grime and, more significantly, the vernal purge.
My mother went after disorder of any kind with the steely determination of a Gestapo officer. She resembled the pre-war German hausfrau for whom, famously, dust was considered the enemy. The fact that she married a European Jew who had barely escaped the Holocaust was an irony that only her children contemplated, though not until much later. The additional fact that she has long since lost all of her mental and physical capacities to Alzheimer’s (though she still technically “lives”) presents yet another irony. Maybe her frenzy for organization and sterility was in fact a premonition.
Our mother’s prodigious list of spring cleaning chores featured:
• Removing all drapes and curtains, taking them to the dry cleaner
• Cleaning windows inside and out
• Changing out winter for spring and summer clothing
• Polishing all good china, crystal and silver
• Scrubbing floors and shampooing carpets and upholstery
• Emptying and scrubbing kitchen drawers and cabinets
• Washing out the fireplace
• Top-to-bottom-style sweeping and sorting of attic and garage
“She didn’t recruit the children to participate in the yearly chores,” recalls my sister. “This was a private religious ecstasy that she experienced with the ‘help.’” Sister Mary adds that, regarding housekeeping, our mother believed in the enema analogy, what author David Foster Wallace would call “The Broom of the System.”
Fast forward several decades. Is my mother now a relic? I mean, is her approach to the rites of cleanliness passé? My own attempts at tidiness are sporadic. My sister still maintains a pretty Spartan household. My brothers don’t count because this is, or was, a woman’s passion or torment, depending on how you look at it. And for the general public? Well, the tradition lingers, but with different kinds of emphasis, especially in Southern California.
Many Southern Californians face spring and summer with the intention of closing windows and doors, so as to cool their homes with air conditioning. But I think the concept of new, fresh beginnings in springtime — call it pagan, Judeo-Christian, or something else entirely — persists.
New and fresh means clean, and lately, clean means “green.”
Terri Bennett is an earth scientist, syndicated columnist and mom. She writes about transforming the spring cleaning experience to a spring greening experience. She’s not the first person to suspect that the air inside our homes could be toxified by chemicals in cleaning solutions.
“Through residues left behind in floors and surfaces or fumes in the air, these chemicals can contaminate your home,” Bennett writes. She goes on to describe health issues “ranging from asthma and allergies to reproductive problems.”
Her suggestion:
1. Read the labels on your cleaning products. “If the ingredient list is a bunch of chemicals you can’t pronounce, it’s probably not green.”
2. Purchase products with the government’s Design for the Environment (DfE) logo. Or purchase Seventh Generation products, which are more environmentally progressive than even the government’s approved brands.
3. Finally, she recommends basic, traditional cleaners like vinegar, lemon juice and baking soda; although she reminds readers that vinegar can damage marble.
I can’t help but add my mother’s own self-proclaimed ingredient for housecleaning: elbow grease. And I wonder, as the slender blades of grass show, and the iris and daffodils blossom outside her windows in the faraway land of my childhood, if she, in her more faraway land of dementia, might be dreaming of a clean and sparkling renewal.
Contact Joanna Dehn Beresford at truewrite@yahoo.com.
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Did you know that five Seventh Generation products carry the DfE logo?
All the products that carry the DfE logo are listed at http://epa.gov/dfe/pubs/projects/formula....