(Shutterstock)
The Victorians sealed their houses against winter’s bluster, then flung open the windows in spring and aired out all the coal dust, swept out the soot, laundered and pressed the bedlinens, sparkled up the windows, and let the sunshine stream in. The catharsis appeals; the work does not. I tend to befriend our dust; its presence soothes me. Life is being lived here; nothing is sterile, scrubbed, or new, untried and overshiny, potentially toxic.
I do prefer to think of the dust as the slow crumbling of antique books and blown-in bits of earth, not mite corpses, microplastics, insect poop, and shed skin. But either way, it rounds the tables’ sharp edges and softens the glare. Mainly, I leave it be.
So does the planet. Desert dust cools us, scattering sunlight and breaking up the high clouds that warm the planet too well. When the dust drops back to earth, it falls onto snow and ice and darkens them, so they will absorb more heat. Dust leaves behind iron and phosphorus, nutrients that find their way to the Amazon rainforest or fall into the ocean and feed the phytoplankton that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Yet another bit of cooling we forget to appreciate. Imagine, if we had no dust, how hot this place would be. Atmospheric dust has been increasing, of late; researchers found 26 million tons of microscopic mineral particles in the air, “equivalent to the weight of about five million African elephants floating in the sky.” Come to help us.
Earth, you see, has the friendliest dust. The lunar stuff is abrasive and smells like spent gunpowder, and Martian dust, with its perchlorates, silica, and iron oxides, can be toxic. Colonists will choke on that planet’s frequent dust storms; better warn Elon. Let us, the rest of us, just stay here, where the dust contains bits of our skin, oiled with squalene, which has the power to neutralize ozone before it hurts our lungs.
Yay dust. So why do I, this spring, feel the urge to clean? Sunlight slants across the dust and I run for one of those magic microfiber cloths. Even my husband came home the other day with a tin of Bon Ami, bought on impulse at the hardware store. He proceeded to scrub the bathroom fixtures. I watched with reverence.
Normally, neither of us cleans of our own volition unless guests are coming. But it has been a rough few months. Questionable moral conduct at the nation’s highest level. A trail of deliberate destruction. A whirl of deliberate chaos. Enough volatility to throw the whole world off its economic axis. In short, the public sphere feels out of control. Understandable, then, that at least in the private sphere, we would want to enact the ritual of spring cleaning.
Culture after culture has seen cleanliness as holy, a way to ward off evil. People are “dirty” when immoral; “clean” when irreproachable. Do devils hide in clutter, scum, and mildew? Germs and vermin do. Were we in Thailand this month, we could watch the April festival of Songkran, in which people clean their homes and temples and use water for purification rituals. That sounds solemn and stuffy, but on the streets, we would find playful water fights used to wash away bad thoughts and behavior. Brazilians clean before Carnaval, but they might be preparing for illicit thoughts and behavior.
Ancient Persians called their spring cleaning “shaking the house,” scrubbing and painting to create at least the illusion of order and a fresh start. The Chinese sweep away the previous year’s bad luck before the Lunar New Year and then—I love them for this—ban any sweeping during the celebration, so as not to whisk the good luck away. Mexico’s el barrido, “sweeping out the old” ritual involves sweeping in a specific pattern, moving always from inside to out. Which is also a good way to clean one’s psyche.
Though I am not domestically inclined, it cheers me to think that women—and a few guys with tins of Bon Ami—have done these same tasks every spring for millennia. We will never know much about how or why, because cleaning was women’s work and therefore insignificant.
I run a meditative finger over a dusty ledge. Not insignificant at all. These rites have power. Study after study confirms that cleaning and decluttering reduce anxiety, increase dopamine levels (by 47 percent in one study), and reduce stress hormones. Clear away the filth you have brought into your home, tidy your sprawling and strewing habits, and you regain a sense of clarity and order, maybe even resilience.
After reading the studies, I blast James Brown and scrub and sweep, adrenaline washing over me and leaving me aglow with sweat and pride. I have overcome my sloth. The house shines. It shines so brightly, in fact, that I can now see where paint has flaked away above the front door. No problem! I am on it! I set up the ladder and pry open the paint can. As I stand, precariously balanced, humming as I dab with a small brush, I hear the birds outside, singing as they tidy their new nest on the front porch roof.
We all need spring’s fresh-washed innocence, its promise of a world made new. Life by its very nature is messy and dark, and nests get blown to the ground, and we already know we will not manage to keep the world clean. But every year, we scrub and polish what we can.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
