Back "Home," Spring = O-soji

I made a list of goals to accomplish while enjoying the long vacation.  One of those was to do some serious cleaning out in the upstairs rooms.  The season for "spring cleaning" (or o-soji) is before the end of the year here...love all the tips in women's magazine about how to clean the grit accumulated in the window tracks, or ensure you're pipes are sparkling all the way down! That's a half-sarcastic and half-sincere comment...sometimes they point out places I would have never even considered to be needing cleaning...and they DO need to be cleaned.  Well, starting a new year with a shiny, clean house is lovely, but the dual big holidays of Christmas and New Year's plus all the other stuff around then ensure that my house will never enter the new year in a pristine state.

For me, spring is the season.  Get some of it done before new year's, and then another massive clean right about now, when windows can be reasonably opened and EVERYTHING aired out without freezing off one's extremities, and life is good.  Well, maybe that is just a bit of an exaggeration, but it is quite nice to fall asleep in a freshly aired futon, with spring smelling sheets, no dust, no winter must, and everything actually tidily put away. Not to mention all the tidying, tossing, etc in every other corner of the house, and outside too!  I was very pleased to have my son help with tidying up all the junk the wind blew into our outside space, pull some weeds and plant seeds...flowers!

I lost track after 10 bags of "non-everyday" garbage thrown out over the past month, and am feeling quite pleased!  Hanging on to my high-school child's second grade textbooks is really pointless (the artwork is safely tucked away though!).  Also managed to get rid of tons of old toys, papers, etc.  Whew!  Cleaning is still underway...well, it's one of those things that if you ever stop, you might never get caught up on again!

The list isn't complete (and the cleaning part might actually be done by the time "o-soji" rolls around again), but feeling much lighter and springier now!