Spring Cleaning
Newsletter 2026-04-09
I’ve never understood the concept of spring cleaning. Why pick up when it’s finally warm enough to go outside and avoid the mess indoors? It would be more seasonally appropriate to do winter cleaning, when you and the clutter are locked inside together. There’s only room for one of you. Spoiler alert: It’s the clutter. It stays, and you have to move out. I recently disregarded my own advice—as I usually do since it’s always bad—and engaged in unofficial spring cleaning. It wasn’t an explicitly declared initiative. We were simply home for break, and the mess was in the way of us living our lives. We either had to put it away or keep stepping over it. I opted for the latter since I have long legs, but my wife said we had to pick up. Marrying a short woman has its downsides. Cleaning up wasn’t as bad as I expected; it was much, much worse. Now that it’s over, we can enjoy the fruit of our labor. That fruit is from the tree of knowledge, and the horrible truth it revealed was that the real cleaning will never be done.
The biggest issue was Lucy and Waffle’s room. It had been a disaster for months with clothes strewn all over the floor. It looked like a department store had exploded. I should really ask her where her clothes got all those burn marks. Waffle’s excuse was that her dresser was falling apart. It was an IKEA one we got for free from my brother-in-law. That sort of furniture isn’t meant to be transported to a second location. If you move it from the room where it was assembled, the particle board joints fall apart. Adding shock absorbers costs extra. Waffle’s dresser was just enough out of alignment that several of the drawers wouldn’t close, revealing the unsettling state of her clothes inside. Some things aren’t meant to be seen by human eyes. Those wrinkles still haunt my dreams. She needed a new dresser to cut off the mess at its source. She picked out a new one over spring break. I carried the boxes upstairs, and Lola unpacked them and assembled the parts. Before you can clean up a mess, you have to make a bigger one. All that extra cardboard might never leave my house.
Lola assembled the new dresser entirely on her own, as is her custom. To her, putting together furniture is like building a life-size Lego set. I view it as a dryer form of waterboarding. While I have patience with people, who can be reasoned with, I have no tolerance at all for uncooperative inanimate objects. They don’t have to work right, no matter how much I swear at them. Lola happily assembled the dresser by herself while listening to an audiobook. I hid in a different part of the house. I wasn’t summoned until everything was together. It was my job to get the old dresser down the stairs and out of the house. It was kind of her to leave me with the only part of the job that could be solved with brute force. I know my role.
The dresser wasn’t particularly heavy, especially with the drawers out, but it was nearly five feet long and very unwieldy. Moving it down the stairs should have been a two-man job. I live in a house full of small women. They are capable and independent, yet they have their limitations. They’ll never be able to reach high shelves without a step ladder, and they’re not great at lifting furniture. Rather than waiting a few days for one of my friends to be available, I did my best to manhandle the dresser down the stairs on my own. That was an exceptionally bad idea, even for me. The two ninety-degree turns in our grand staircase were specifically designed to keep out marauding furniture. If we were ever attacked by the wardrobe from Beauty and the Beast, we could run upstairs and be perfectly safe. Predictably, I got stuck at the first bend. I called for help. Betsy came to my rescue. I didn’t need her to lift. I just needed her to steer. Guiding the front end of the dresser, she helped me get it the rest of the way downstairs. That’s where it stayed for the next four days. The forecast called for rain. I didn’t want the particle board to turn to mush. When the weather finally improved, I put the dresser on the corner in front of our house. It was gone in two hours. That’s the best part of living in a society. I claim I don’t need other people, but they sure are nice to have around when I need to make unwanted furniture disappear.
Replacing the old, broken dresser with a nice, new one that actually worked was a simple, straightforward project that left our house cleaner. Things should have stopped there. Naturally, they spiraled out of control. When Lola had gone into the basement to get tools to build the furniture, she had been displeased.
