Origins Of Spring Cleaning

The Origins Of Spring-Cleaning, Or Along Came Eve
By James Snyder

I always know when April makes its yearly debut without consulting the calendar because my wife usually says, “Let’s clean out the garage today.” Trust me on this one, it is no April fool’s joke, but someone gets fooled. And believe me, I’m just not anybody’s fool. I’m my wife’s fool.

Somehow, her “let’s” has a funny singular ring to it and we had, if I remember correctly, a double ring wedding ceremony. Hers is on her left ring finger while mine somehow ended up in my nose.

For some reason spring brings to women, wives in particular, an uncontrollable urge to clean something. It doesn’t matter what that something is, it has to be cleaned. Moreover, it does not matter how clean or dirty that something is or when it was last cleaned, it must be cleaned again.

This represents a basic philosophical difference between men and women. In the beginning, man was perfectly at home with dirt, then along came Eve and introduced spring-cleaning.

We have no idea how long it was between Adam and the time Eve came onto the scene, but it was long enough to get the entire Garden of Eden dirty, necessitating a thorough cleaning.

Thus began the yearly ritual known as spring-cleaning. This tradition has been handed down from mother to daughter since the beginning of time. As far as I can ascertain, no father on record has handed down to his son any way of putting a stop to this nonsense. And don’t think I’m not just a little upset about that.

I think our forefathers could have found a fifth father to help come up with a workable plan to get rid of this yearly onus.