Spring Cleaning, Part Two: Chemistry
Today in New York City we are enjoying our first taste of spring. As I walked home from the corner deli, I noticed that the last sooty wedges of old snow had vanished, replaced by the patches of wet concrete that signify March meltoff and presage April showers. Spring's famous new growth is making its first tentative queries: the tiniest buds have appeared on the trees and the palest green grasses have surfaced on the soil. I took George Schenk's excellent primer on mosses and lichens
off of the shelves of the homekeeper's library, for I have also noticed that moss, one of my favorite plants, is weaving its velvety poetry between stones and sidewalks. I like moss because it exists between two worlds -- lush and tactile like a plant, but soft and seeping like a fog. It is fitting that moss is reclaiming its turf during these earliest days of March, for though spring is announcing itself, we are really between the worlds of winter and spring. There is certain to be more cold to come, but warmth is gathering to alleviate it.
Today, though, it is sunny, and windows are open throughout Astoria to welcome that most fundamental of cleaning products: a fresh breeze. Fresh air plumps pillows gone flat from service on snowbound days of reading and watching tv, dissipates the last of the fumes from hearty cold weather cooking, clears out Candlemas’ candle smoke. I wrote last year about my grandmother's firm belief in the cleansing power of fresh air, and also that it is a trait that I have inherited.
It cannot be coincidence that the moment the weather allows for open windows (even if only for an hour or two), evidence of spring cleaning starts to appear. Cars pull up from a morning run to the home center, to be unloaded of flats of flowers and herbs for planting in garden patches from balcony pot to courtyard plot. Laundry appears on clotheslines as beds are changed, towel supplies are replenished, closets are organized. Bags of recycling are set out, as reading spots are purged of magazines and newspapers that gave shape and purpose to snow days.
In that home center, flats of cleaning products have been set out, and it is during this first warm weekend that these retailers see the annual spike in sales in this area of their business. At the onset of spring, housework, seen so often as drudgery, becomes a ritual that invigorates. Spurred by that very impulse, I wrote about spring cleaning last year (you can request your free, printable checklist here) This year, as the rebirth of spring carries special significance for me, my thoughts are not just with the task of spring cleaning, but with the consumer products we use to do it.
A health scare last summer caused me to examine, among other things, the chemicals I was encountering daily, weekly, monthly as I kept house. Households have been at the center of chemistry since the dawn of the hearth. In the ancient world, homekeepers knew the secrets of combining elements to form compounds that achieved an effect -- something good to eat, an enhancement to personal allure, a method to prepare a home for a life event. Such skills have been a fundamental contribution from the homekeeper to the greater social unit, from their own family to the local municipality to society as a whole. For example, though today every time we step into the shower we are taking for granted a simple bar of soap, during the homesteading days, that simple bar of soap came to us from the labors of a homekeeper skilled at rendering it during a ruthless multi-day process. Furthermore, that resulted in extra product for barter with other household wizards, whose labors in turn could be focused on anything from lamp oil to jam.
Homekeeping manuals from the beginning of literature about the domestic arts to this day contain sections on chemistry. Studying the historical volumes in this highly specific area of literature is an education on, among other things, how demanding housekeeping could be. Catharine Beecher's landmark A Treatise on Domestic Economy
, which appeared in the 1840s, takes three pages to teach the basics of doing laundry, and that does not include the pages of instructions for making laundry soap. Moving ahead one century, my copy of Eleanor Howe's Household Hints for Homemakers devotes entire chapters to household chemistry in one form or another, from its inevitable appearance in the laundry section to instructions on cleaning everything from silk flowers to coffee pots.
Even as informal a study of the history of housekeeping as paging through a turn of the century Sears Roebuck catalog leads to an appreciation of why the chemical industry was welcomed into American homes with open arms during the postwar period. Household chemistry brought the cleansers to the homekeeper premixed and with enhanced facility to do their jobs, and these were serious advancements. Chemistry not only made it easier to keep house but made it a reward, because the homekeeper could be admired for the results whereas someone in a lab had engineered the substance that had done most of the work.
These advances are true and good, and I don't know any homekeeper including myself who doesn't take advantage of them. However, I also grew up in the American suburbs in the 1970's, and I know from that perspective that a wire was tripped between the ease with which household chemistry promised and delivered a clean home and the definition of what constituted one. I remember all too vividly my mother's certain conviction that her house was clean when it smelled like lemon additives. In my research last summer as I evaluated how I keep house, a theme which consistently emerged is that somewhere along the line, the chemicals took over.
The best distillation of the issue came, unsurprisingly, from Martha Stewart. The press materials that accompanied the launch of her cleaning products line discuss that a home should only smell clean, it should not smell of chemicals. This struck a chord with me because I can still see my grandmother shaking her head in bewilderment over my mother's housekeeping, which centered on any product that promised not just the reduction of effort but the lack of it. It must have been bewildering for my grandmother because, though she wasn't so old-fashioned as to make her own soap or floor wax, she still put bluing in the laundry and pressed lilac water for the ironing. I believe that this informed why my grandmother was so open to teaching me when I expressed an interest in the domestic arts: it wasn't the Indian way to withhold knowledge when a child expressed an interest, and she hadn't been able to impart the lessons she had to teach to her own daughter.
In evaluating how I keep house after twenty or so years of doing it, the fundamental lesson I have learned is to respect that there is a distinction between clean and chemically stripped. That doesn't mean that chemistry is automatically the enemy -- the cleansing process itself is a chemical reaction – nor does it mean that "green" cleansers are automatically the answer. For I have discovered that a product being labeled "green" does not necessarily mean that it is more environmentally friendly to the world or to the home than a non-green-labeled one, and I have discovered that we cannot assume that products so labeled and marketed actually perform. To that end, in the next column, I'll share some of my favorite products -- some tried and true, some new – that we use in our urban home to safely and effectively maintain a clean, healthy living environment.
off of the shelves of the homekeeper's library, for I have also noticed that moss, one of my favorite plants, is weaving its velvety poetry between stones and sidewalks. I like moss because it exists between two worlds -- lush and tactile like a plant, but soft and seeping like a fog. It is fitting that moss is reclaiming its turf during these earliest days of March, for though spring is announcing itself, we are really between the worlds of winter and spring. There is certain to be more cold to come, but warmth is gathering to alleviate it.Today, though, it is sunny, and windows are open throughout Astoria to welcome that most fundamental of cleaning products: a fresh breeze. Fresh air plumps pillows gone flat from service on snowbound days of reading and watching tv, dissipates the last of the fumes from hearty cold weather cooking, clears out Candlemas’ candle smoke. I wrote last year about my grandmother's firm belief in the cleansing power of fresh air, and also that it is a trait that I have inherited.
It cannot be coincidence that the moment the weather allows for open windows (even if only for an hour or two), evidence of spring cleaning starts to appear. Cars pull up from a morning run to the home center, to be unloaded of flats of flowers and herbs for planting in garden patches from balcony pot to courtyard plot. Laundry appears on clotheslines as beds are changed, towel supplies are replenished, closets are organized. Bags of recycling are set out, as reading spots are purged of magazines and newspapers that gave shape and purpose to snow days.
In that home center, flats of cleaning products have been set out, and it is during this first warm weekend that these retailers see the annual spike in sales in this area of their business. At the onset of spring, housework, seen so often as drudgery, becomes a ritual that invigorates. Spurred by that very impulse, I wrote about spring cleaning last year (you can request your free, printable checklist here) This year, as the rebirth of spring carries special significance for me, my thoughts are not just with the task of spring cleaning, but with the consumer products we use to do it.
A health scare last summer caused me to examine, among other things, the chemicals I was encountering daily, weekly, monthly as I kept house. Households have been at the center of chemistry since the dawn of the hearth. In the ancient world, homekeepers knew the secrets of combining elements to form compounds that achieved an effect -- something good to eat, an enhancement to personal allure, a method to prepare a home for a life event. Such skills have been a fundamental contribution from the homekeeper to the greater social unit, from their own family to the local municipality to society as a whole. For example, though today every time we step into the shower we are taking for granted a simple bar of soap, during the homesteading days, that simple bar of soap came to us from the labors of a homekeeper skilled at rendering it during a ruthless multi-day process. Furthermore, that resulted in extra product for barter with other household wizards, whose labors in turn could be focused on anything from lamp oil to jam.
Homekeeping manuals from the beginning of literature about the domestic arts to this day contain sections on chemistry. Studying the historical volumes in this highly specific area of literature is an education on, among other things, how demanding housekeeping could be. Catharine Beecher's landmark A Treatise on Domestic Economy
, which appeared in the 1840s, takes three pages to teach the basics of doing laundry, and that does not include the pages of instructions for making laundry soap. Moving ahead one century, my copy of Eleanor Howe's Household Hints for Homemakers devotes entire chapters to household chemistry in one form or another, from its inevitable appearance in the laundry section to instructions on cleaning everything from silk flowers to coffee pots.Even as informal a study of the history of housekeeping as paging through a turn of the century Sears Roebuck catalog leads to an appreciation of why the chemical industry was welcomed into American homes with open arms during the postwar period. Household chemistry brought the cleansers to the homekeeper premixed and with enhanced facility to do their jobs, and these were serious advancements. Chemistry not only made it easier to keep house but made it a reward, because the homekeeper could be admired for the results whereas someone in a lab had engineered the substance that had done most of the work.
These advances are true and good, and I don't know any homekeeper including myself who doesn't take advantage of them. However, I also grew up in the American suburbs in the 1970's, and I know from that perspective that a wire was tripped between the ease with which household chemistry promised and delivered a clean home and the definition of what constituted one. I remember all too vividly my mother's certain conviction that her house was clean when it smelled like lemon additives. In my research last summer as I evaluated how I keep house, a theme which consistently emerged is that somewhere along the line, the chemicals took over.
The best distillation of the issue came, unsurprisingly, from Martha Stewart. The press materials that accompanied the launch of her cleaning products line discuss that a home should only smell clean, it should not smell of chemicals. This struck a chord with me because I can still see my grandmother shaking her head in bewilderment over my mother's housekeeping, which centered on any product that promised not just the reduction of effort but the lack of it. It must have been bewildering for my grandmother because, though she wasn't so old-fashioned as to make her own soap or floor wax, she still put bluing in the laundry and pressed lilac water for the ironing. I believe that this informed why my grandmother was so open to teaching me when I expressed an interest in the domestic arts: it wasn't the Indian way to withhold knowledge when a child expressed an interest, and she hadn't been able to impart the lessons she had to teach to her own daughter.
In evaluating how I keep house after twenty or so years of doing it, the fundamental lesson I have learned is to respect that there is a distinction between clean and chemically stripped. That doesn't mean that chemistry is automatically the enemy -- the cleansing process itself is a chemical reaction – nor does it mean that "green" cleansers are automatically the answer. For I have discovered that a product being labeled "green" does not necessarily mean that it is more environmentally friendly to the world or to the home than a non-green-labeled one, and I have discovered that we cannot assume that products so labeled and marketed actually perform. To that end, in the next column, I'll share some of my favorite products -- some tried and true, some new – that we use in our urban home to safely and effectively maintain a clean, healthy living environment.
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