bits and pieces, odds and ends

Ugh. Spring is coming and not coming. Today is gorgeous, sunny, the temperature in the high forties, that perfect feeling where the air is still cool but the sun is forcefully warm, and I know I'll have to park on the far right side of my unpaved driveway to avoid a bogdown like the snow has never given me. But tomorrow it's supposed to snow, sleet, plunge down into the twenties, and be generally sour and nasty.

This seesawing hurts the human psyche -- or, at least, mine. To have a taste, just a taste, of that Perfect Spring Day and think, It's here!, and then to have it snatched brutally away -- it leaves me feeling exhausted and mildly ill. This winter has been long. I loved it up until the end of February -- give me all the seasons in their turn -- but now I just want it to GO AWAY. Bring on the flowers. Bring on the bugs. Bring on the little baby leaves and "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and the daffodils and the tulips and the brand new grass. Bring on the mud and the warm rain and the sloppy front porch and Saturday afternoons lounging around in shorts. Bring on SKIRTS and pretty sandals and painted toenails and the little shiver that comes from wearing them all when it's just a little too cold. Bring on jeans with the knees torn out and long walks on the weekends.

Bring it on.

In the meantime I'm subsisting at work and trying to get more sleep. Tiredness (which I tend to allow myself to fall into when I'm distracted by Things, and the Things have been numerous and tangled) annihilates all sense of perspective. My parents (yay!) are coming up this weekend (I can say "up" now, and not "over," because Michigan lies north of Pennsylvania) and I need to spend the next two evenings shopping to restock my spartan shelves, and cleaning with a Valkyrie's avenging fury. Die, dirt.

In the spirit of spring cleaning, which appears to be a chromosomally based seasonal disease, I'll paraphrase (as I do not have the source at hand) an idea of Annie Dillard's from For the Time Being: When we houseclean -- when we sweep and dust and get rid of the dirt that settles inexplicably over all of our possessions -- we are literally preserving our civilization. She notes that the ancient cultures didn't shovel dirt over their cities and move away; getting buried is something that just happens. It's why a city has, mysteriously, many many layers of prior generations or millennia of human life -- burying is something that the earth does to us over time.

So much for the banality of housecleaning. As thankless as it can be sometimes, it's also one of my favorite things to do when I'm feeling edgy, irritable, restless, bitter -- "anger speaks best / through the stiff bristles of a brush / and the slow pull of shoulder muscles tired / after housecleaning" -- it wears me out and gets something constructive and civilization-preserving done at the same time. Everybody wins.

I've said for awhile that the woman's basic, stereotypical duty -- which appears to work itself out rather frequently even in today's enlightened marriages -- is to fight entropy. Which, since entropy is a law of physics, makes woman's one of the most basic and noble fights of humankind.

Just in case you loathe the very idea of housecleaning. Come on, pick up that Swiffer! You're saving the world as we know it. And resetting the entropic clock. And that's all in a day's (or a lunch hour's, or an evening's) work.