housekeeping notes

This evening the house, by and large, smells of lavender and pine and orange. It also smells somewhat fresher than before, because it was so pleasant and sixtyish outside and I opened the large windows in the library and dining room downstairs and in the master bedroom upstairs. It is a very pleasant scent indeed.

Nights like tonight always evoke Delius' On hearing the first cuckoo in Spring. I think it calls forth a memory I have of being a girl and listening to WFLN-FM, the now sadly defunct classical radio station in Philadelphia while shuffling my 3x5 index cards (silly reader--they weren't my hip PDA, but my research notes!) and writing a term paper for history class. Spring was a time for accomplishment and assessment, for preparing to leave behind the old year. I think it was snippets of Delius, and maybe Holst, and Vaughan Williams, that began my lifelong affair with the English Romantics.

But I digress from the original purpose of this post, which was to confess what an occasional housekeeper I truly am, and how exhausting it is to cope with the consequences of that condition.

This weekend I ambitiously embarked on spring cleaning. I prepared for myself a long list of tasks and accomplished about half of them.

Kitchen: impeccable, although the pantry still needs attending.

Living room: clean, dusted, all accumulated magazines (four years' worth of the Nation and assorted alumni magazines from graduate and undergraduate institutions, for pity's sake) discarded. National Geographic, and X's favorite subscription, saved and stored. All books that have migrated downstairs for one reason or another (from a Douglas Adams omnibus to Roosevelt's Secret War and a history of the 38th Welsh Division), put back where they belong. This, I must point out, was no small feat.

Library: dusted. Alas, the books are a mess. My goal in the future is to catalogue every one of them by its Library of Congress number and order them accordingly, but I have no idea when I will find the time to undertake such a monumental task.

Downstairs and upstairs entirely vacuumed, thanks to X, who alone wields the Dyson.

Garage cleaned, thanks to X, who has some motivation in this regard: he received, as a birthday present, a rather nice jigsaw and wanted to get his workshop into a condition worthy of the new addition.

Only thirty of the sixty tasks I'd set for myself got completed, but I'd say that's a pretty good start. The challenge, of course, is to try to maintain that level of order throughout the week. I would like very much to live in a perfectly ordered house. I would like to see if indeed it can be done.