Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 28, 1994                   TAG: 9403300136
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CLEANING UP

I don't.

From time to time, I have cleaned house. Especially when I've wanted to rearrange the furniture. Indeed, I have, on occasion, rearranged the furniture in order to clean the house. I've also painted entire rooms for the same reason: to get them cleaned up.

But clean for the sake of cleaning? I don't do it. Not in the spring. Not any time.

I "pick up." I raise a flurry of dust when it gets to the point that names can be written on tabletops. I run the sweeper over those parts of the carpet that show. But that's about it.

Love me, love my mess.

So the other day, when I caught myself considering the need for spring cleaning, I pressed my palm to my forehead. I checked my pulse. "Do you feel all right?" I asked myself.

I answered myself, "No."

"Then, just sit down here and rest a minute," I counseled myself. "Have a beer. Some cheese and crackers. Maybe a Tootsie Roll. Think this thing through. Don't make any rash moves."

"You're right," I told me. "I wouldn't want to be rash."

I sat and thought.

And here's what I concluded:

It's not my house that's a mess. At least, it's not my house that's the mess that's bothering me. It's everything else.

It's the whole landscape. The whole world is a mess.

Everywhere I look, everywhere I go - a mess! A pluperfect, dag-blamed mess! Broken trees, fallen branches, mulched debris, piles of sawdust, lengths of log, ragged tag-ends of pine - scattered all over the place!

And this is just in my yard. Drive even five miles down the road - any road - and it's worse.

A better person might just tie a bandana around her head, hitch up her britches and pitch right in. A better person might haul out the chainsaw, haul out the rake, haul out the pickup, and get this mess cleaned up.

I'm not a better person.

Last weekend, I spent one miserable hour hauling branches from where they'd fallen to a place where they could be burned. I grunted and sweated and cursed my fate. But it made no difference at all. The yard is still a wreck.

I'm disheartened. You know how you can spend all day long, hours and hours, moving every stick of furniture in the house, spraying Endust over and over onto the old undershirt you're dusting with, whacking out spider webs, sweeping up dust bunnies, and then, after you've cleaned every single possible surface there is to clean and you sit down with a sigh of relief, the first thing you see is a cobweb trailing through the air from the upper corner of the picture over the fireplace?

That's why I don't clean.

And that's why I'm thinking we'd be better to leave the branches rot right where they are.

Because we'll never get this all cleaned up. No matter how hard we try. We could work every spare minute of every beautiful spring day, and there'd still be some stray branch poking out of the grass, waiting to snag the mower.

Better just to leave off mowing, too.

Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times &World-News columnist.