Ostara is the time we start to think about spring cleaning. What, not you? In that case, I have a secret for you: cleaning is fun, and I speak as someone who has done it for a living. If you’ve lost the joy of cleaning, get the kids to help you. Kids love to clean. No, I don’t mean “picking up;” no one likes to pick up. I mean real cleaning: sweeping, scrubbing, dusting, washing, mopping, and polishing.
In our school district, the third graders take a yearly field trip to the working farm of Foster Fields in Morristown, New Jersey. Their favorite activity there is doing the laundry: working the laundry stick up and down in the tub, scrubbing the little blue rags on a glass washboard, then running them all through the wringer and clipping them to the clothesline to dry. A few generations ago, you could buy toy cleaning sets for children—not the toy vacuum cleaners that don’t really vacuum, but scaled-down brooms, brushes, buckets, and washboards. They were small, but they could still get the job done.
As practical as it sounds, spring cleaning is as much a ritual as hiding Easter eggs or serving up a Seder. In China and Japan, houses are swept out and scrubbed at the New Year, when it’s not yet even beginning to get warm outside, but in Europe and North America, the big clean happens in spring. Why? In the old days, the maids had to wait for fair weather before they could give the house a thorough “going over,” which involved carting all the furniture outdoors and taking up the carpets (which were tacked to the floor), rolling them up, hanging them on a line, and beating them with wands of woven cane. This could not be done while the family was in residence, so the townhouse maids would have to wait until they had decamped to the country house whose staff would already have taken apart and put the rooms back together before they arrived.
In even older days, the first warm days of spring meant the livestock could finally be turned out of their end of the house and back into the fields. These houses were dirt-floored affairs, full of smoke and straw and, quite often, chickens—not the sort of house that one could ever get spic-and-span, but they could at least be shoveled out and smudged with bouquets of juniper and blackthorn. (Spic-and-span, by the way, is a mishmash of Old English and Old Norse words meaning “nail and wood shaving” and originally referred to newness, like the scent of IKEA furniture fresh out of the box, rather than cleanness.)
Of course, the laundry couldn’t wait for spring; that had to be done weekly, less often if you were well-to-do and had more clothes. Few household chores are as mystical as laundry. There used to be a taboo against doing laundry during the Twelve Days of Christmas because you were said to be washing your winding sheet and sure to give up the ghost before the New Year. Of course, if the infamous Washer at the Ford decided to take in your laundry, there was really nothing you could do about it. The banshee-like Washer at the Ford haunts the shallows of Irish rivers where she scrubs the bloody garments of those about to die.
Here’s another secret third-graders adore: We still refer to bed-sheets as “linens,” even if they’re made of cotton. That’s because all bedclothes used to be woven from linen. We also call them “whites” because the linen was bleached in urine, which is, after all, cheaper than bleach.
If your kids still aren’t sold on housekeeping, there’s help out there. For the very young, Mother Goose would suggest reciting:
When I was a little girl, I washed my Mommy’s dishes/
Now I am a big girl, I roll in golden riches.
You might also try this little-known third verse of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”:
This is the way we wash our clothes [etc.]
On a cold and frosty morning.
Personally, I recommend the classic Easter tale The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, which, despite having first been published in 1939, is almost militantly feminist. The title character, an apparently single mother of twenty-one little bunnies, trains her offspring to do all the household chores so that she can go out and realize her lifelong dream of delivering Easter eggs to human children. For slightly older kids, there’s the Grimm’s fairy tale “Mother Holda,” in which the dutiful housemaid is rewarded with gold and the lazy one with a bucket of pitch. Teens can be sat down in front of the sumptuously domestic films Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Scent of Green Papaya. Cleaning never looked more romantic!
To be clear, Mui, the young heroine of The Scent of Green Papaya, is a maid because she resides with her employers. A cleaning lady who comes in once or twice a week is technically not a maid but a charwoman, from Old English, cierran, “to turn,” as in, to take a turn at working at something. Or is it from the Irish cear, meaning “bloody”? I must remember to ask the Washer at the Ford when I finally meet her.