Spring Cleaning

So it’s springtime in the Carolinas.

Never mind that it’s here a few weeks early and there has been virtually no winter to speak of. The daffodils are up and blooming (at least in the neighbor’s yard) and my plans to wait until Valentine’s Day to transplant some small shrubs has to be moved up a few weeks. It’s springtime.

That also carries with it the idea that it’s time for Spring Cleaning.

I’m betting the concept of Spring Cleaning goes back to a time when houses were all closed up for the winter and things just got generally nasty and needed to be aired out. In a house that is on a 5 lane highway, I can tell you that there’s NEVER a time that we get to open the windows and air out the house. So we stay closed up all the time.

You reach a point, though, usually after (a) having to help clean out the house of someone who passed away or (b) after watching an episode of “Hoarders” on television and living in mortal fear of a camera crew showing up on your doorstep, that you simply have to address things.

We came up with the concept a couple of years ago of taking “one room a month” and cleaning it out entirely. Following that line of reasoning, the entire house would be cleaned out in about a year and a half, meaning that we could then rest on our laurels in a clean and uncluttered environment until the market comes back and we can move into our brand-spankin’-new dream condo that is on a single level, has windows that don’t let the wind whistle through and a crew that maintain both the yard and the pool.

It was a decent effort. It lasted two months, which is roughly three times longer than the average New Year’s Resolution for some of us. Then the decision to go back to school happened and the project got put on hold. During that time, we got the attic in pretty good shape, other than dealing with enough Christmas decorations to do the windows at Macy’s on any given year.

Anyone who’s ever lived with a person who is pursuing an advanced degree – especially when they’re writing their thesis / dissertation – knows that EVERYONE in the house is working on the project. It is absolutely a joint effort that puts everything else on hold. The only thing that I can imagine that might even begin to come close to equating this change in routine is a pregnancy / baby, and I have to rely on third party information for that comparison.

But even during graduate school life goes on, and sometimes you have to give the student a bit of space and occupy yourself. So with that in mind – and having seen an episode of Hoarders that hit close to home AND hearing this weekend’s edition of The People’s Pharmacy on OCD and hoarding (http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2012/01/28/844-overcoming-obsessions/) it was obvious that the universe was sending me a sign that it was time to start again.

Plus, the dissertation surveys closed out this week and EB was glued to his computer analyzing data.

My decision was to tackle the kitchen, starting with the pantry. It had, since before the holidays, taken on attributes of Fibber McGee’s closet, and I suspected that the strange odor was a vagrant vegetable that had managed to set up its own ecosystem in there.

There are some things about an old house that are great. Our pantry is one. I’ve seen bathrooms that were smaller and, after I remodeled it a few years ago, it now has steel shelving that goes all the way up to the 10 foot ceiling, a fluorescent light that turns on with a switch (as opposed to the bare bulb hanging from a wire that we started with) and, if fully stocked, would completely feed us for several months.

That’s the theory, anyhow. The reality is that it becomes a jumble of things rarely used and assorted bits of flotsam and jetsam, the “real food” either being stored in the freezer or in another cabinet. The result is that things I’m going to use “someday” when I make “insert name of impossibly complicated dish here” migrate to the pantry to either evolve or die.

Cleaning the pantry is a solo task, especially when there are divergent philosophies on how to interpret date codes on food. One school of thought is that things go out the day the expiration date passes. Others of us take a more liberal approach, viewing those dates as merely guidelines, kind of like the traffic markings on the road in NYC or select Bible verses. They are somewhat informative if they agree with the position you wish to take, but otherwise you can chart your own path.

Even I have to admit, though, that there comes a time when you have to look at something, admit that you are NEVER going to use that in your entire life, and either give it away or throw it out. It was with that fresh philosophy that I tore into the pantry.

It was not an easy task, eating up substantial parts of both days of the weekend and exacting a significant emotional toll on me.

We might need that.

I am gonna make “insert name of impossibly complicated dish here” with that.

There are starving children in China who will go to bed hungry if we waste that.

I never said the arguments were logical. They are a part of my DNA, though, and it is exhausting to try and overcome them.

Kind of like making myself go to the gym.

Never mind that there are at least three grocery stores within a one-mile radius of our house. Even in the worst blizzard, I could trek through the ice and snow for a package of brown sugar and chocolate chips in the event of a baking emergency.

At the end of the day, the only old things in the pantry were those that I intentionally left there. Indeed, they are so old that they no longer qualify as “food”.

Three bottles of “Adam’s Extract” – glass memorials with cork liners in the metal lids, which were left in the house by Mrs. Miller when we moved in, and a tiny bottle of Olive Oil that I scarfed from Mom’s kitchen when I moved into my first apartment.

Not because I needed olive oil – I suspect that this was acquired by her shortly after she and Dad married in 1959, in those days when everything was deep-fried in Crisco and nobody knew what to do with something as impossibly exotic as olive oil, but it looked like something that a well-stocked kitchen would have.

I just liked the shape and size of the bottle, and it reminded me of growing up and mom’s kitchen.

I suspect the next chapter of the cleaning saga will go to the other extreme, attacking items with a much shorter life-span than some of the foodstuff in the pantry, as we have two separate closets with a variety of electronic gadgets in them, including a huge tangle of charging adapters of uncertain provenance that seem to have crossed species and interbred in the darkness of their environment.

Part of me will want to try to match them to whatever gizmo they originally powered, placing the technology all together in a nice ziplock bag for future generations, while the rational side of my mind says, “If you haven’t used it in that long, you don’t need it. Put it in the box to throw away.”

Maybe I should take a few weeks off before tackling that, though, giving my psyche a chance to adapt to the new rules.