The classic children’s book, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham, begins with spring cleaning. The mole, one of the most important characters, is busy cleaning his underground house. Suddenly, he throws down his broom and rushes up into the light and air, where he finds new friends and new adventures — in Mole’s own words, all the delights of spring without the cleaning.
This charming book has been made into several stage shows and movies and is still popular after more than a hundred years. But the message it contains has still not sunk in. The famous mole decided that spring cleaning was a waste of time. Who are we to argue?
The desire to make things clean and tidy at this time of year seems to be an almost biological urge. Like most biological urges, it should be resisted. Spring may be the season of renewal and new beginnings, but there’s no point in going mad about it. The energy and optimism we feel at this time of year shouldn’t be wasted on cleaning and tidying.
Only a few hundred years ago, spring was a season of joy and happiness, music and dancing, not extra domestic labor. In primitive countries like England, the spring ritual would include a Maypole Dance, in which young youths and maidens would dance around a pole, holding ribbons attached to the top, which wound them closer together. This might have been a metaphor for something or other. The Romans had a great festival in honor of Flora, the goddess of springtime, and there was nothing clean or tidy about it.
We can imagine that our very ancient ancestors might have needed a spring cleanup. Thousands of years ago the housing stock was primitive, and people were obliged to spend the whole winter crammed into narrow caves or small huts with an open fire in the middle, few bathroom facilities and no twice-weekly garbage collection, eating on the floor and throwing mammoth bones about. You can see that they might have felt the need to freshen things up a bit in April, although they probably didn’t.
The big annual cleanup is an entirely modern idea. The great palace of Versailles, home of the French kings, was notoriously filthy and chaotic. It was only later that cleanliness and tidiness became associated with respectability and even with an almost religious virtue.
I feel the tug of the spring cleaning obsession myself, but only very faintly, like the gravitational pull of a distant star. I never have any trouble ignoring the symptoms. The habits of a lifetime are just that — the habits of a lifetime. My desk, for example, has never been tidy since I first had a desk in school at the age of five, and my bookshelves are a librarian’s nightmare. But disorder is a metaphor of life itself, and exact order reminds me of the opposite. Life is not orderly, let alone clean and tidy, and there’s no point in pretending that it is.
The solution to the spring cleaning impulse, like the solution to everything else, is moderation. A small amount of cleaning and tidying will feel just as virtuous as a lot. Last week, following some obscure impulse, I rearranged some pens and books and a little statuette of an owl on my desk and wiped the dust off the exposed surfaces. This felt good, but enough is enough. Like the mole, we should throw down our brooms and enjoy the spring.
