Trying — and failing — to escape spring cleaning

It’s that time of year again. The season women look forward to and men fear. It’s spring cleaning time. 

I learned this when I woke up Saturday morning and saw my wife standing by our bed with a mop and pail with my name on them.  
Courtesy Myron Kukla Myron Kukla
All I could think of was, “Where does someone find a monogrammed mop and pail?”

I am not a fan of spring cleaning. It seems to me that spring cleaning is a repetitious procedure that you have to redo … well, every spring.  

I would much prefer having a “decade” cleaning, where every 10 years, you power wash the inside of the house and let it dry.  I have voiced this opinion to my wife, Madeline, without success. 

She seems to have some ingrained idea that once a year, you should dust, wash, and wax everything in your house that doesn’t move. 

Cavewoman times

Spring cleaning has been around since cavewoman times. Back then, cavewomen would insist on sweeping the dirt out of the cave every spring and throwing out the old saber-toothed tiger bones that collected in the corners.  

Even in prehistoric times, men couldn’t see the point of spring cleaning.  

“Why take bush and sweep cave?” Yak would ask. 

“Bush cleaning in the spring gets out the dirt that has built up in the cave over the winter,” Mrs. Yak would say. 

“But the whole cave is dirt,” Yak would protest.

“Even dirt needs to be cleaned,’’ his wife would declare. 

Yak would think over this reasoning and then say, “I have to go hunt mastodon.” 

Spring cleaning ritual

Even though several millennia have passed since cave cleaning times, the ritual of spring cleaning goes on. 
 
Truthfully, as a man, I don’t see any reason for spring cleaning, but women do. They must have a cleaning gene imprinted on their DNA that men don’t have. Really.

My wife and I will look at the same coffee table and she will see dust that needs to be cleaned where I don’t see anything. 

“There’s no dust on that table,” I will say, pointing at a perfectly clean coffee table. 

“Well, what about this?” she says, snatching a lamp off the table to reveal a clean circle amidst a sea of dust. 

“Oh, sure, when you move something, you can see dust, but otherwise it’s fine,” I claim.

The big excuse

Deep down, I had hoped my wife this year would somehow forget spring cleaning season and go right into my favorite “lie on the hammock and read a good book season.” But she didn’t, so I tried my usual list of excuses to get out of spring-cleaning: 

• “I can’t spring clean today. Super Bowl 50 is being rebroadcast on ESPN2.” 
• “I had a dream that I will get seriously hurt if I do spring cleaning.” 
• “I’ve sold the house. We’re moving.”

None of these had any impact on my wife’s decision to start cleaning. She just kept bringing out mops and buckets and dust rags and detergents until I could hardly see her behind the mountain of cleaning products piled in the center of the floor. So, I pulled out my absolute best excuse. 

“I have to go hunt mastodon.”

Myron J. Kukla is a Midwest writer and humorist and the author of several books, including “Guide to Surviving Life” and “Confessions of a Baby Boomer.” He is also a former Holland-based reporter for the Lakeshore Press and Grand Rapids Press. He and his family live in Holland, the tulip capital of the world.