It’s time for spring cleaning – but is that your best choice?

For many folks, it's soon going to be time for spring cleaning, but I'd like to share a poem with you that I recently happened upon. It’s titled “Dust If You Must,” and the author is Rose Milligan.

Dust if you must,
But wouldn't it be better
To paint a picture, or write a letter?
Bake a cake, or plant a seed,
Ponder the difference between
Want and need?
Dust if you must, but there's not much time,
With rivers to swim and mountains to climb,
Music to hear and books to read,
Friends to cherish and life to lead.
Dust if you must, but the world's out there,
With the sun in your eyes and the wind in your hair;
A flutter of snow, a shower of rain,
This day will not come around again.
Dust if you must, but bear in mind,
Old age will come and it's not kind.
And when you go – and go you must –
You, yourself, will make more dust.

Sometimes I'm glad I'm myopic and everything looks fine. One time, a visiting handyman proposed putting fluorescent lights in my kitchen so I had more light to see better. No, thanks!

An ambulance stretcher could make it through my front door and through my rooms most conveniently when I may someday (far off, I hope) be on my way to a more sterile environment.

Long ago, my mother used to employ her favorite student, Charles, to help her dust. She loved to direct, standing in her quilted housecoat and pointing to the top of her ceiling fan. He did this for years, and one day he found her asleep in her big armchair at high noon, beside her big ball-fringe lamp. Like me, she liked to glue things on other things.

She didn't appear to be breathing, and her hair bow was still. The golf ball-sized pearls around her neck hung limp. He put a mirror to her nostrils. No mist or fog blurred the reflection of her red-lipsticked mouth painted using Cherries in the Snow by Revlon. My, oh my! He ran down the back alley straight to Short Funeral Home and summoned the funeral director, Mr. George Short, to come straight away!

My mother's eyes blinked open from her dreams of "The Young and the Restless" and "The Bold and the Beautiful" soap operas to see Milton's premier undertaker peering into her face. Unruffled as usual, she asked, "What are you doing here, George, and didn't I teach you in the second grade?" This was a question she always asked anyone younger than her.

As a child, I wasn't tasked with many chores. Once, I threw flour everywhere on Mickey Dickerson's kitchen counter when visiting my classmate, Billie Lynn, her daughter. When Mickey complained to my mother, my mother replied, "Pam Bounds doesn't do dishes!"

My maternal grandmother Ella Rickards lived with us and did most of the household chores, treating me like the young emperor of China, even cutting my meat and making my bed. My mother always used to say, "You’re Mother's child," meaning my grandmother.

I don't want to give you the idea that I'm over-the-top messy, because my husband would never tolerate that, but my part of the house cleaning consists of rubbing my hand over one antique table per day, maybe with the cuff of my favorite falling-apart sweater. I finally get them all taken care of as I make my rotation around the house.

One thing I have in common with my mother is my taste for knickknacks. Once I took some of my collection to a local thrift shop. Upon visiting my mother's house for dinner not long afterward, I saw that my mother had purchased those same figurines, all of them, and they were displayed in her den. This is a true story!

I suppose there is mitochondrial DNA involved somewhere along the genetic line. She wants to remind me that her presence is still around, for I sometimes hear a bird warbling in the trees outside, singing, "Pam Bounds doesn't do dishes."