Front Porch: January is a good month to start ‘spring cleaning’

So here I am in mid-January doing my version of spring cleaning.

I’ve never understood the whole concept of spring cleaning. Why, when the weather is getting nice out, would you want to be indoors cleaning away? That’s the time to be out raking, tending to shrubs and grubbing in the dirt while those early rays of spring sunshine warm your face.

January – that long month of gray skies and cold weather – that’s the time to be indoors getting one’s post-holiday home tidied up, affairs put in order and prudent purging of no-longer-used items taken care of. And so I am. With a vengeance.

I did have to look up “spring cleaning” to understand why this bit of annual prolonged housekeeping was assigned to springtime. Interesting history. It is associated with several cultural and religious traditions. One thought is that it dates to the practice of cleaning in advance of the Jewish festival of Passover, the celebration in the spring of the Israelites’ escape from Egyptian slavery. The mandate is that the home must be rid of all leavened foods (chametz) during Passover, and there is a traditional scouring for chametz crumbs by candlelight the night before the holiday begins.

Another view is that the origin of cleaning in the spring comes from observations associated with the Persian New Year, celebrated on the first day of spring, when everything in the home is thoroughly cleaned. The practice is called khooneh tekouni (meaning “shaking the house”).

It is also noted by researchers that on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, and at the start of Lent, in the spring, altars in the Catholic Church are thoroughly cleaned. Also, Orthodox Christianity observes what is termed Clean Week the week before Lent starts.

There are practical explanations, too, of course. In North America (and before vacuum cleaners were invented), March was a good time for a vigorous dusting of the home because it was warm enough to open doors and windows but not warm enough to be bothered by insects flying in.

I own a vacuum cleaner and am not affiliated with any of the above religious customs, so spring cleaning seems quite arbitrary to me. Truth be told, I’m not such a fanatic housecleaner in any season. I’ve made my accommodation with dust. It does have to live somewhere, so I don’t mind if a bit of it chooses to take residence on my coffee table from time to time. Still, I do like good order (not a fan of clutter), and some minimal deep cleaning does go along with that.

In January.

My current rampage through the house kind of began in November, when I began preparing a “cheat sheet” of important account information, doctors’ names, gathering together in one location auto titles and other legal documents and details of our affairs for our sons to have so that whenever the time comes for them to have to deal with these things, the road map will be in hand and everything will be easy to find and handle. It was a labor-intensive activity and a successful one … except for that one piece of paper I needed to complete the project.

I went from safe deposit box to assorted file folders in assorted locations to find the darn thing, but it was elusive. I realized then that I had way too much archived and no-longer-needed paperwork, so I slowly began the purge. And, happily, in so doing, I came across the missing document I had been searching for.

After the holidays I returned to the task. But you know how it is … clean out one drawer in the kitchen, and suddenly, you have torn the entire kitchen apart. It’s really quite logical. If you have to move something from one drawer to, say, the pantry, well then, the pantry needs to be reorganized, too. And so on.

I have gone through both of our working desks, file cabinets (for business and personal records), the dining room buffet, the entire kitchen, the storage closet in the basement – and still have the linen closet, our bedroom closet and dressers and one bathroom to go.

And then there are my beloved bookshelves in the family room, which go wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor. There reside some of our most prized possessions – books, cherished friends from my own and our children’s childhoods and from years of collecting, reading, rereading and sharing with friends. I know I should move some of these books out, but I’m not sure I can bear to part with any of them.

I have vowed that when the rest of the house clean-out is finished, I will go through the bookshelves and at least review everything, better organize and just maybe say goodbye to a few tomes. But like Scarlett O’Hara, I shall think of that on some other tomorrow.

Meantime, I have dispatched disreputable old cookware, shared or donated unused items, reorganized lots of storage locations and systems. And shredded, shredded, shredded. I’m still redoing my address book, have updated our digital photo album and am eagerly anticipating each day getting one task or another done in The Great Purge.

Pretty sure this isn’t late-onset OCD or mania. There’s still the requisite amount of dust to be found in my house, and I am happy to take time off from the tasks to goof off or do other things.

But there is something quite fulfilling about this January spring cleaning. If nothing else, it does help the month move along quickly and get me closer to real spring – just 62 days from today.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.