Cleaning

Cleaning tends to mount up and become oppressive. Doing a quick sweep is doable. Realizing that the floors could do with a wash turns an easy task into something more.

Yesterday, it struck me that I really needed to do something about my kitchen. In the end, it didn't take too much effort. It's now all gleaming white and shiny again. I have room on the counters again. I still need to do the rest of the place. But I keep walking into my kitchen and saying to myself, "Look at my nice clean kitchen, isn't it nice? Doesn't it look pretty?"

I had rather hoped that having one nice room would motivate me to get the rest of it done. But no such luck. You find instead that you would rather google different decorating styles, envision different pieces of furniture and furnishing that would totally transform your living space. So then, you put the kettle on and make a pot of tea and loose yourself in decorating dreams.

Then you get swept into gardens. Spring flowers are in the stores and they smell wonderfully like spring. Once you've mentally outfitted a few indoor rooms, you start designing a few flower beds for a change. Mulling over the pros and cons of annuals versus perennial, shrubs and trees, ground cover, your garden becomes spectacularly full of colour and texture; you can smell the grass, the light perfume of the roses, feel the sun on your back and hear the hum of the bees.

By this time, it's lunch. As you leave your mental world and return to this one, it takes a few minutes to readjust. You're trying to figure out where your new sitting room went - you just spent a fortune on new furniture. You're not sure but you think you may have imported it from somewhere. And you had the walls painted and a new floor put down. You were pretty sure that you had knocked that wall through. Then it starts to come back, you were cleaning. Then to make it worse, you realize that the sky is still overcast, the snow is still piled to the sky and spring is still a good month away.

You still need to take the garbage out.