Spring Cleaning: At your house or mine?

By Ann Burnside Love

Do I mean heavy-duty spring-cleaning, where you roll the rugs, carry them outdoors and beat them with a tennis racquet? Hardly. Though some of us may have traces of memory about that. For myself, I can’t remember when my mother did not have a vacuum cleaner, although the cooling process in the kitchen was by icebox, until the amazing Frigidaire came along.

When I think about spring cleaning, I’m certainly relieved not to still be living in the six-bedroom house where I raised my children, although it was emotional agony leaving it, or the three-bedroom house on the edge of the park I bought when they were grown, or even my first retirement house in a 55-plus community. I remember them all. And I remember spring cleaning in all of them.

After I became a young widow with four young children, I started a little advertising business in our basement. Soon it was thriving and outgrew the basement — and because I was working around the clock as we entrepreneurs do to support children — I hired a woman to come in once a week to clean and do laundry. And the series of women who followed in my subsequent homes kept them so clean, the only places that needed spring cleaning were the attic, basement and garage … and that was largely a matter of pitching stuff into the trash or the give-away pile, with the help of my children, a practice I actually came to love.

Of course, I heartily respect women who did most of it themselves. I, too, have washed walls, waxed floors on my knees and hung up load after load of laundry outdoors. But most of us come to the stage when cleaning house, much less spring or fall cleaning, isn’t something we can continue to do physically, or that we don’t want or are unwilling to do anymore. That’s why I find the system in my retirement community so accommodating.

We have teams of employees available to clean apartments or cottages every week, two weeks, month, or special occasions. Pleasant reliable employees who do a really good job and are proud of their work. And here’s the best feature: A whole team comes every fall and spring to do a thorough seasonal cleaning, which includes washing windows, pulling out and cleaning behind refrigerator and range, wiping down blinds and much more.

We also have maintenance workers who clean ceiling lighting fixtures among a very long list of other tasks — and come when you need them in an urgency. I’ve found these likeable, capable workers do good things all year long, whenever needed. Fortunately, all this is similar in most retirement communities.

So what does my own spring cleaning consist of now? Sorting closets and drawers for clothes, linens and books for charities or the trash. Like the idea of regular cleaners or on-call maintenance? This is one of the chief reasons retirement communities exist in the first place! Carry on!

  

Ann’s blog appears here every Thursday. Comments are welcome!