Spring Cleaning and Other Adventures

I think when the weather is bad, these essays tend to get a little long. Sorry. But what else am I to do with a first week of May when it rains and snows – every day? My brain says “It’s May! You should be out in the garden working, enjoying the beauty of the season!” But no – it rained and snowed and even hailed during the week. I was in school several days and that helped to keep me occupied. When I wasn’t in school, and being trapped indoors, I was feeling pretty gloomy, so I decided to begin a thorough Spring Cleaning – and to write about it, of course. Which brings me to Thoreau.

Yes, this was last week.

My first encounter with Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) was a poster on the wall in my 9th grade English teacher’s room. It had Thoreau’s face looking very nineteenth-century transcendentalist, and beside it the words “Our lives are frittered away by detail . . . Simplify, simplify.” Being a teenager, I never bothered to ask who he was or what he meant. Then, for some reason (it was the early ‘70s and maybe Thoreau was in vogue then), that year for Christmas my parents gave me a paperback copy of Thoreau’s Walden. I read it and I will admit I didn’t grasp it fully. Or I thought I didn’t. Later, in the ‘80s when I was in college at Cal State Northridge, I took a writing class and the teacher assigned me to read Walden and analyze Thoreau’s writing style. On reading it a second time, I realized that many of his ideas had actually taken hold all those years ago and shaped my thinking in profound ways. I’ve read Walden several times since then. The quote on the poster is an edited version of a longer passage:

“Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.”

Due to poster size limitations, and possibly the ability of the average poster reader to comprehend long passages, they took the first sentence and went to the end with the two words “simplify.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, trying to be transcendentally clever commented, “One ‘simplify’ would have sufficed.” From the time of my first reading, and perhaps always, I have loved simplicity.

My love of simplicity was strengthened when I went to Japan on my mission where I encountered the teachings of Shinto and Zen with their emphasis on simplicity that permeates Japanese culture. I fell in love with the traditional Japanese style of an uncluttered and simple environment. The Shinto and Zen gardens I visited there are the some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. And I love a traditional Japanese home with its clean, open rooms, with minimal furniture, all natural materials, and harmonious proportions. If I could, I would have a Japanese style room in my house with tatami mats and zabuton pillows and a tokonoma (alcove) to display simple ikebana floral arrangements.

A Japanese Garden.

A traditional Japanese room.

We live in a time of mounting complexity where we get swept along in the cluttered currents of the age and hardly even realize it. I have to remind myself from time to time that things need not be so complicated. Clutter in all its forms, physical, mental, binds us down. We too easily become a captive to all the things we fill up our space with. Our possessions come to possess us. In the spring especially, I get the urge to simplify, to get rid of clutter, to create open and harmonious space around me. When that mood hits me, spring cleaning can become brutal.

One of my biggest dilemmas is books. Do books complicate and clutter up my life? I live in a house filled with them and seem to acquire more and more without any effort on my part. Many I have read, some not yet. Of the ones I have read, many I will never read again. Should I send them on? I have done that a few times in the past, usually without too much regret afterward. But I struggle.

So after all of that – I began Spring Cleaning on Monday morning with the most difficult room in the house for me – The Library/Music Room. There are over a thousand books in that room. The simple task of taking them off the shelves and dusting them is daunting enough, but to sort through them, evaluate them, decide which to keep or give away is a titanic undertaking for me. I have two major problems with parting with books. The first problem is that my books are a sort of biographical catalog of my life. They mark the phases I’ve gone through over the years, the path of my education – my long obsession with World War I, my explorations in literature, music, and art, my binges into European and American History. Even if I will never read some of them again, each book holds a place in my history. Just to look at their spines as they sit on the shelves stirs memories of the times that belong to each title.

The Library/Music Room before we began.

The second problem is that I see owning books as possessing knowledge. My books are an extension of my brain. All those words printed on all those pages are pieces of knowledge, history, and culture, that belong to me. I know that we live in an age when most, it not all of that information is available electronically, but what will happen when someday the power goes out or the powers that be in the world decide to delete or alter all that digitized knowledge. They cannot change my books, and though some of them might be outdated, most of them are timeless, and they remain solidly available here on my shelves. Besides books are a far more elegant and satisfying way to store knowledge than 0s and 1s.

I began tackling the library on my own and was not doing so well. I cleared off the short shelves at the end of the room which are mostly reference and history books. I stacked them on the dining room table and began to sort through them. After an hour or two, the give away pile was very small, just a few old text books with bad memory associations and some outdated tour guides. Then Miriam joined me and brought her objectivity and practicality to my rescue. We didn’t put too many in the pass along pile that day, but then we only did that one set of shelves. We dusted the books we were keeping and placed them back on the shelves in a somewhat logical order. That was all I had the time and energy for. The rest of the room would have to wait for another day.

Getting ready to dust and sort.

One set of shelves done, more to go.

Tuesday and Wednesday I was in school, so I did not return to Spring Cleaning until Thursday. It was another chilly, rainy day and so no temptation to try any work in the garden. I had other chores that I needed to do – unload chicken feed, run into town on errands, go to the Amish dry goods store – but my main goal that day was to work on the long bookshelves. I did the other things early in the day to get them out of the way. By 10:00 I was ready for the books. I approached the task with excitement and a little dread. I took down books off the top two shelves and stacked them for evaluation. I could almost feel some of them projecting a fear of being discarded. Were they worthy of a place on my shelves? I was to be the judge. Some, of course, had nothing to worry about. They were treasures. But others had a questionable status as books that none of us had ever read, that were never going be read, and held no intellectual or emotional attachment. They went into a box to be donated to the library. By chore time we had finished those two shelves and we stopped. There are three more shelves to go. We’ll work on them this week.

Thursday evening we had dinner at the Shillig’s house to celebrate an early Cinco de Mayo. Kurt and Julie had a great fiesta meal for us – tamales, taquitos, refrijitos, rice, guacamole, salsa, with limeade and horchata to wash it down – and all of it delicious. Miriam made a chocoflan and alfajores for dessert. Our friends Bob and Nancy Jones joined us and we had a lovely dinner. We take every opportunity to have a big Mexican dinner. We love it.

Miriam's alfajores.

Friday morning it was foggy and just above freezing, but when the sun came up, the sky cleared and it was a beautiful spring morning. I saw our first oriole at the feeders that morning. Most of the summer birds are back now – Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Chipping Sparrows, White-crowned Sparrows. I’ve yet see any swallows or hummingbirds, but they’ll be here soon. I took a long walk around the garden in the early sunshine. I didn’t have time to do much garden work but to plant some seeds and pull a few weeds. We had weekend plans that I needed to prepare for.

The weather finally clearing.

The end of the week was way more exciting than the beginning. On Friday afternoon we drove to Columbus, Ohio, where we met up with the Thayns and the Fosters to spend a few fun days together. A college roommate of Rachel and Sarah’s was also there with her family. They all were there earlier in the day and had already had gone to the Wild Animal Park. We arrived there around 7:30 to find the party well underway at the motel pool. Because it was Cinco de Mayo, we went out for a late treat at a Mexican ice cream shop. Then we turned in.

Russell with his Aunt Sarah.

Cinco de Mayo ice cream.

We spent most of the day Saturday at the Columbus Zoo. We love to go to zoos and the Columbus Zoo is a pretty good one. It is big. We saw lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) and so many other animals. We went to the aquarium and the reptile house and aviaries. We had a great time.

At the zoo.

Hazel feeding lorikeets.

At the polar bear pool.

After the zoo, we ate lunch at the Chic-Fil-A and then drove over to the Columbus Temple Open House. The Columbus Temple was closed for several years for some major renovations. It is a beautiful building. It is the same style temple as the Palmyra Temple, but Columbus seemed a little fancier. We took the tour and then headed to a famous local ice cream parlor for one last treat together. Then we said good-bye to the Thayns who headed home and our group followed the Fosters home to Toledo where we spent the night. We went to church with the Fosters and had a delicious lunch with them and then headed home again.

Lunch at Chic-Fil-A.

At the Columbus Temple.

Florence loves ice cream.

At our stop at Kirtland.

The drive from Toledo to our house is six hours long. It seemed longer this time. We always listen to books while we drive and that helps. We stopped for a short break at Kirtland as we always do. We arrived home at 8:30, unpacked and went to bed. Now this morning, it seems almost as if I dreamed the whole weekend. After so much fun time spent together, going back to the old routines makes me feel a bit glum. I think I’ll be better after the sun comes up. The day is supposed to be sunny and mild and I have lots to do. I’ll start with an orchard inspection to see how the trees are faring and then I think there are at least a thousand weeds requiring my attention.