Spring cleaning time — pass the vinegar

Spring cleaning is calling my name.

Actually, that’s my wife saying, “Pat, it’s been spring for a month. Don’t you think it’s time to do some spring cleaning?”

It is. But, for some reason, I just haven’t been in the mood. With all the Swiffer dusters, Kapow cleansers, windows that tilt in with the touch of a thumb and vacuums that can pull a golf ball through a garden hose, spring cleaning just isn’t the same as when I was a kid.

Where is the scent of vinegar in the air? The rat-tat-tat of the rug beaters? The rrrrrrrrrripping of holey underwear into rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrags?

That was spring cleaning time at our house, back when folks paid a lot more attention to the calendar than they do today. I’m sure if we would have been Native Americans, we would have had a smaller, home version of Woodhenge in our backyard and sang and danced around the circle of wooden poles until the sun got to just the right spot. But we were German, so we had the spring cleaning ritual instead.

There was much to be done and everyone had to pitch in.

My favorite spring cleaning job was the beating of the rugs. Wall-to-wall carpet was “just a fad,” Pop said, so there were lots of throw rugs and large area rugs all over the linoleum and hardwood floors. We dragged three or four at a time out to the backyard and slung them over the clothesline.

We had two rug beaters. They were made from clothes hanger-like wires that looped around till they came together to form a short handle at the non-business end. They were about as tall as your average 8-year-old (me). Our rug beaters had a lot of miles on them. The wooden handles were held together with electrical tape, but they worked.

I pretended I was Kenny Boyer — or Bill White from the left side. In my best Joe Garagiola voice, I set it up: “... Koufax gets the sign. Nods. He’s into the windup. Looks like a fastball down the middle and Boyer swings ...” BAM!

Wire slammed into rug. It was the shot heard around the neighborhood. It echoed off houses and garages like gunfire.

Birds fluttered out of trees.

Drivers stopped to see if a tire had blown.

Dogs howled.

A cloud of dust surrounded me just like Pig-Pen in the funny papers. When two of us beat rugs together, we got a rhythm going. Faster, faster, faster until it sounded like a machine gun. Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat. Afterward, we didn’t stop vibrating for hours.

Washing windows was another big spring job. Pop and the older boys went around with a ladder and removed all the storm windows. They weren’t the kind that slide up and down in tracks. They were heavy windows with thick wood frames that Pop made from scrap lumber.

I wanted to squirt off windows with the hose or climb the ladder, but I was too short and too slow to get the glory jobs. I wound up with a bucket of vinegar water, cleaning the storm windows on the ground.

My hands smelled like sauerkraut for a week. We used old newspapers to wipe the windows dry and squeaky-clean.

My hands were black for a week.

We needed lots of rags for spring cleaning, so Mom made the rounds to all our dresser drawers to check for holey underwear — not the kind you wore to church but the Swiss-cheese-looking ones. When you heard a rrrrrrrrrrrrrrip, you knew another old friend had bitten the dust.

Pop liked to oil things in the spring, especially garden tools. Hoes. Shovels. Garden forks. There was no WD40 in convenient spray cans. He had a milk carton of 30-weight motor oil that he drained out of the old Buick last winter and kept for just this purpose. It was gooey. But it felt kind of good. If you oiled the shovel right after vinegar-washing windows, you had the makings of a good salad dressing on your hands.

We cleaned last season’s grime from the barbecue grill, hosed out the gutters, moved plants outside and restrung clotheslines.

There were inside jobs, too. I liked bringing down spiderwebs with what looked like a long-handled Q-tip. Sisters do not like being chased by giant Q-tips. Especially ones with spiderwebs on them.

We cleaned out closets, moving the winter stuff to the back and the summer stuff into the on-deck circle.

The best inside job was sliding a long brush in and out of the radiator coils. The purpose was to get the dust bunnies out and onto the floor, where you tried to sweep them up before they scurried under the couch or bed. But it made the coolest noise — like playing a xylophone with a broom. It was music to my ears.

This story was originally published April 9, 2016 at 8:15 AM with the headline "Spring cleaning time — pass the vinegar."