What’s Spring without the Clean?

Spring is just around the corner (oh thank goodness!) but I’m wondering how we’ll welcome it this year, seeing as 2020 has turned all of our usual traditions upside down.

Before COVID, the coming of spring was ushered in via the Big Spring Clean. Curtains were washed, the house was thoroughly dusted and polished from floor to ceiling, windows got cleaned, rugs were shampooed and aired and all in all, the entire house got the kind of clean and polish that far exceeded the usual weekly whiz-over and it felt good. But that’s what a waft of warmer weather and the fragrance of blossoms in the air will do to you.

Post COVID however, and we are standing in our sparkling, spotless abodes, looking around and wondering what to do next because the Big Spring Clean began back in March, which is the beginning of autumn here, when we all went into lockdown. That’s right, suddenly armed with a lot of time on our hands we decided to get stuck into the cleaning in a very big way.  Like, I had friends working built-up dust out of tiny crevasses and joints on the furniture with make-up brushes and that was just the beginning!

Anyway, following the mega-clean, came the odd jobs. All those things that we’d been forever putting off suddenly became  must-do. Things got mended, painted, polished, constructed and generally seen to because it was a natural progression from the Big Clean.

And then we all moved outside because once the house was cleaned to within an inch of its life and all the odd jobs had been seen to, moving on to the yard was a given. The grass got mowed, re-mowed, and then mowed again. The gardens got weeded, turned replanted, fertilised, mulched and generally neatened up to the level of “showpiece” and it all happened between March and August because we were all at home and at a loss to find some way to fill all the free time we suddenly had at our fingertips.

But these are all the things we usually do come springtime, so what are we going to do now? We are going to be all hyped and energised with the return of the longer days and the lovely warmer temperatures we’d been longing for all winter…but with no spring clean to expel it on because we started doing all of that back in March and were done by April!

Okay, so we spent the rest of lockdown with puzzles, board games,  TV, movies and social media but that was okay because who wants to be outside in winter anyway, but now that things are warming up and we want to be out there doing things (while not going out anywhere specific and adhering to the social distancing directives still in place) we are all going to be at a bit of a loose end.  Any of us who are really desperate could get stuck into doing it all over again, but it just wouldn’t be the same, if you know what I mean.

Maybe we could just give ourselves a makeover instead, in preparation for summer, just on the off-chance we might be able to go out more and want to look good. We could dig out the cleansing face masks and the exfoliators, the nail polish and the fake tans, and get stuck into the fitness thingies we didn’t do over autumn/winter because we were too busy with the spring cleaning and the gardening. Surely there must be something we can do to mark the change of season… or maybe we could all just flop down in the sunshine and catch our breath after all that activity of the last few months.

That could work…

 

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