Cue Johnny Mathis…It’s beginning to look a lot like…Springtime….everywhere you go.  Take a look in the Five and Ten, Glistening once again with candy canes and silver lanes aglow.   What? ?  I know if you are in the Philadelphia area getting inundated once again with SNOW (my envy, by the way, continues from waterlogged England) this song might actually work for you.  But I’ve been humming it along the way these past few days- substituting in Springtime for Christmas – as I’ve navigated around the lanes of Surrey and Kent because I can’t help  bursting with bits of exuberance every time I see a stance of daffodil blades surging up through clumps of green grass hassocks around the boggy verges.  I feel as excited as a Christmas Eve kid with every citing of them bravely standing tall and sun bound with trees careening over and, in fact, uprooting around them and, yikes, more often than not falling across the lanes I drive home from Caterham to Brasted.  I’m telling you those almost-full-on-daffodils are the business.

And you thought my pumpkin could cop an attitude, well, these beauties – even before they’ve got their trumpets of ruffled yellow blossoms unwrapped from the brown papery spathes* at the top of their stems, they can make you feel so genuinely good with their promise of brighter days and fresher seasons.  I bought three bunches from Sainsburys rubber banded and green through and through on Wednesday and by Thursday evening, they’d delivered with their big reveal and launched their beauty across the length of our kitchen table with their milk bottle vases helping to keep the simplicity of their joyous arrival clean and uncomplicated.

Not only that, they got me so motivated I know I have to wait another eighteen days before it is official, but they made me declare Spring Season Open and the cleaning has begun at the Bennett household.   It has been remarkably satisfying to attack my overloaded, out of date snack pantry, linen cupboard and even my own bedroom clothing closet.  I hadn’t needed to address them until now because I had been lucky to live off the state of affairs from back in 2012 when I did my chemo and we had Debbie join us for the duration, she set the standards on housekeeping at Heverswood so high, to be honest, leaving things in such a tidy state, literally all compartmentalized and labelled, we’ve been almost as well run as Downton Abbey since then or at least close enough to make Mrs Hughes proud.

Eventually, however, the emergence of the daffodils did trigger  a Duracell (almost EASTER!!) bunny-like cleaning mania in me and I’ve been attacking the storage areas of Heverswood with a vengeance.  Interestingly, alongside my crazed state of filling the bags for recycling, the charity shops and the dump, I couldn’t help but get distracted by thoughts about time and how we mark it.  Ever the multitasker in around my scrubbing, scouring and chucking, I became ensconced in  Skyler’s maths homework all of which seemed to be based on Time, telling it and even reporting it in analogue, digital, 12 and 24 hour. He also had words to learn like “decade”, “century”, “millennium” and “fortnightly” which spoke to me.  So much so as I reviewed the fate of a skirt I found folded over the straight part of a wire hanger sporting a line of dust along the crease denoting it was going in the charity bag, I contemplated without obvious clues like the aforementioned dust, how do we know when we are ready to throw out certain items and why do I hang on to some more than others?  I don’t know about you but some of my clothes and shoes escape cleaning culls not because I think I might wear them again but more because they remind me of something I did in them and I can’t throw away that memory.  I am definitely not a hoarder however some items of my wardrobe have become placeholders of sorts in my life.  When I look through to the stuff I might wear sliding along past the items I can’t seem to part with on my clothes rack, it is a little like my own personal Throw Back Thursday popular on Facebook where we post pictures from the past, little touchstones to our memories, and we get to share and even relive some of our experiences again.

That said, it might please your inner Martha Stewart to know, I managed to pitch a couple pairs of trousers I’d bought when we took our first trip to Charleston in 2003 because even if they weren’t appropriate in the UK with their South Carolinian warm, dry weather flair, each time I considered wearing them since returning to our life in England,  they always reminded me of that lightness I had felt when I had splurged on them the time Nick had allowed me a few kid free shopping hours to myself while he looked after single digit Megan and Christy; a gift every young mother can appreciate.  I also decided the black flats which I bought one half size too small ten years ago and had always been convinced I might eventually talk my daughters into wearing for school shoes some time could finally be given to someone else.  My guilt of misplacing the receipt so I couldn’t return the ill-fitting shoes, way back when, finally abated from my penance of giving them a slot for a decade in the shoe rack of my closet.   More harder but still with surety, I finally parted with a purple polka dotted dress I wore to a young mother’s funeral six springs ago.  I’ve come to know her mother well and felt like giving the dress up might be some sort of disrespect to Clair and Joan.  Seeing the dress every once and awhile made me pause and send them both in their own realms a wish for peace.  At the same time, I’ve never worn the dress since , for the same reasons, and decided it was time to send it off into the world of charity shops so someone else could revitalise the dress’ piquancy of purpleness free of my association.  I still hold on to an angel Clair’s daughter made for me on my kitchen shelf above the sink and that is a daily reminder enough to give thanks for her life and my own.

But what did I keep?  Plenty.  There’s the two piece lemon yellow suit I wore as my “leaving” outfit at the Lanesborough Hotel after Nick and my’s wedding reception.  All the Karen Millen dresses I’ve worn to balls and Ascot over the years as I love them almost as much as my sparkly shoes that match them along with the memories of swirling around on Nick’s arm with the likes of the Fergusons, Rigneys and Roubiceks cutting the rug nearby while Chris Kidder, the Mactaggarts and the Lemoniuses shout out as loud as Eliza Dolittle to cheer on our horses at the racecourse in my memory’s mind’s eye.  I also held on to and wiped down once again the cowboy boots Nick bought me when we were first dating in 1993.  He had noted the black boots I wore when we first met were a little tired and he’d taken himself off to Pied de Terre on the King’s Road to guess at my size and buy me a pair thus sealing for me that he was most definitely my sole/soul mate!

I have to admit, now I have got the bags at the ready to bring down to Hospice in The Weald, I feel like I am parting with a little bit of my history.  I am not sad but rather a little lighter from having let go of some of those memories I’ve cycled through each time I’ve come across certain items.  I find I can recall those memories even without the prompts so perhaps they are safe in my heart and the closet can get filled with some new pieces to accompany me in the times that lay ahead.  I feel good for decluttering my space without diminishing the dramas, comedies and tragedies that play out in my head when I look at the costumes of my life.

So as we mark the annual arrival of the rites of Spring this week with the likes of secular cleaning manias, Mardi Gras and pancake flipping Tuesday to the religious Ash Wednesday, Lent and eventually Easter, that leaves me to wrap up this post with wishes for your time to be filled with clusters of crocuses, trappings of tulips and dollops of dandelions.  If you are suffering through inclement weather (besides celebrating the Flyers amazing win over the Caps) remember the old trick my grandmother used when she lived in Florida and missed the change of Spring from the North.  Each year we visited her over our spring break, my mom would bring her pussy willows and forsythia from Connecticut, Illinois and Pennsylvania, kept damp in paper towels and newspaper on the plane which my grandmother then “forced” to bloom in the warmth of her home in Vero Beach with some heated water in a vase and sunshine through the window.  Voila instant Spring!  I hope how ever you measure your time you see it balances with more the bright than the dark weights of memory and you feel invigorated by these thoughts, if not signs of Spring, looming all around you.

*I can not tell a lie and have to admit I am not Becky Lemonious with an encyclopedic knowledge of flowers and I had to look this term up!

PS.  The winner from the Olympics competition are announced as follows…Bronze to my sister, Patty, who didn’t manage to write her story down so I’ll share it with you another time but I’ll let you know it included baby blankets being recovered from one of her dogs’ intestines, Silver to Jimmy Parks whose hilarious account you can read in Sotchi S’motchi comments above which definitely fit the bill, and Gold had to go to my daughter, Christy, who had to suffer the embarrassment of me recounting her little kid throw up session much to her mortification.  So she gets the gold and my public apology for embarrassing her on the internet.