When I was a kid I loved the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. But one scene sticks out in my head as my all-time favorite. In
Little Town on the Prairie, Ma and Pa Ingalls take Mary away to school for the blind, leaving a teenaged Laura in charge of keeping the home fires burning. While her parents are gone, Laura decides to surprise Ma by doing the spring cleaning for her. In the book Wilder describes in great detail (one of my favorite things about those books!) how she and her younger sister washed the walls, emptied and refilled the straw mattresses, swept and washed the floors...even though I wasn't quite sure what "blacking" was and why anyone would do it to a stove, the whole process sounded so ultimately homey and spring-y that sometimes when I finished the section I'd go right back to the beginning and read it again.
That ideal of a cleansing and purifying spring ritual has stuck with me. Every year, when the temperatures start rising, my thoughts turn to dust cloths and mops and vinegar-water-lavender oil solutions. I start planning to wash my walls, beat my dirty rugs into submission, and turn my mattresses.
There's just one obstacle I face that the Ingallses didn't have to deal with: before I can get to my mattresses or walls or curtains, I must first deal with the boxes, bags, bins, piles, containers, and stacks of stuff in the way.
In fairness to my husband and I, we've gotten much better about not accumulating unnecessary stuff over the last decade. For instance, easily 75% of the toys we currently own were purchased before my oldest son turned four or five years old, when we began realizing that they would happily play with sticks and rocks and spending $10-$20 on a toy that would provide maybe an hour of fun wasn't really worthwhile. (case in point: we're spending this week, spring break, in our nearly-empty new apartment in Chicago. Before we left I told each boy to grab some toys they might like to play with while they are here. Each kid grabbed one toy--and that's all they've had for the past four days. And nobody has died yet, though they have done a lot of drawing).
In our house there has been a toy shelf stuffed with neatly-labeled bins of toys for the past three or four years. These are in perfect order, not because I am anal about re-categorizing toys when the kids are done playing with them, but
because they have not been played with in years. These were the "must-haves" when my oldest two were small, and not only did they barely touch them, but now their younger brothers are snubbing them too. There are a few trusty old standbys, of course...toy trains and cars, some blocks, and our kitchen set sees a lot of use. But though I can count on only one hand the number of toys I've purchased for my 16-month-old son, that's still too many: he'd gladly play with old remote controls and random pieces of paper he finds on the floor. And we already have plenty of both of those things.
It's not just toys. Our basement is stuffed to the gills with clothing. Having been in various stages of pregnancy, postpartum, breastfeeding and not breastfeeding, eating well and not eating well, exercising and not exercising, over the past ten years, I have easily spanned ten sizes of clothing. I will (hopefully) never wear six of those sizes again. We have stuff other people handed down to us that was the wrong season or size or gender, and there it sits. We have stuff that was mis-labeled or misplaced when I packed it away so we missed the opportunity for younger children to use it. We have things that are just plain ugly but somehow I think we'll use it someday, so into the basement it goes. Countless times I've sorted the clothes into piles to give away to friends and a Goodwill pile, but somehow, my basement always seems to re-absorb the Goodwill pile before I have a chance to drop it off. Last week I got a slip in my mailbox that the Volunteers of America were doing a donation drive and would pick up your donations if you left them by the curb. Reading this mail made me so excited that the neighbors probably thought I had received the winning numbers from Ed McMahon. A day later there were fifteen trash bags of sorted clothing on my curb...funny what a deadline will do for you.
Clothes and toys make up the bulk of our clutter, but there are other things too. Unused kitchen appliances...a glut of bed linens...outdated medicines and vitamins....papers and notecards...books I'll never read....books I read and hated...books I loved but won't read again so I should pass them on to somebody else to enjoy...
Getting the picture? Contrast this with the Ingallses, who had a few keepsakes, a handful of toys, and probably no more than 3-4 changes of clothing each, and it's easier to see why a modern family has a harder time doing intensive spring cleaning. We have to dig out first.
In the past few years we've definitely taken on a simpler-living approach. But we're still stuck with the evidence of the habits we used to have, back in the day when I would take anything if it was free, and most anything if it was on sale. And of course, moving brings back that old urge to accumulate. I look around this big empty place and think, "My old (lamp, rug, bed) isn't nice enough for this place. Maybe if I just got a new (end table, vase, painting) this room could look really pulled together!"
I must resist. We've already done well on Craigslist, scoring a brand-new Serta mattress, box spring and bed frame for $200. But now I'm obsessed with scouring the ads, looking for something I didn't even know I wanted. I have to remind myself that just because it's a good deal that doesn't mean it's a good idea to buy it. Even free stuff can come with a hidden cost.
So this spring, I'm looking at "spring cleaning" in a different way. Obviously, moving will force us to do "cleaning" in the literal sense (rugs, floors, walls). But more importantly, I'm looking at this move as an opportunity to re-invent my family's relationship with stuff--building a foundation of simplicity. As for my current basement, well, considering I have barely been down there for three years, I'm guessing there's not much down there that I need to move. As long as I get my holiday stuff, my photos, and my old journals, Goodwill and VOA and the Freecycle people are welcome to the rest. As for my lovely new home with its bright, (now) bare walls, shiny wooden floors, and big windows; in a year or two years or five years, I fully intend to be able to get to those walls and floors and windows to give them a good old-fashioned spring cleaning without having to climb over or shove aside or sort through or otherwise deal with boxes and piles and bins of stuff.
Ma would be so proud.
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Meagan Francis is a mother of four and writer. She also blogs
here.
Yesterday I bought a new stainless steel utility sink that my husband installed in a new, lower counter in that same corner of the laundry room. We're going to put a good-sized mirror in there and mount a custom cup-holder on the wall, and that sink is going to be our toothbrushing sink. 
