Spring Cleaning

The warm days of Spring brings to mind the way that Mom (and many other women) would "open up the house" to air it out after being closed up over the winter months. One thing that I recall is that you did smell the lingering smoke smell of the wood stove that had kept us so toasty during those cold winter months.
She would raise the windows as high as they would go, assign each one of us a job to do,and brother we did "get after it!" The floors were swept. the walls and ceilings were swept--light fixtures were washed, curtains washed and of course all of the quilts and spreads were on the clothes line getting their share of fresh air and sunshine. Mom didn't actually mop the floors , she would use her mop bucket pouring all sorts of cleaning "goop" in the water and use her broom to scrub the floor, but the one thing that I remember most is that foul smelling pine sol!! Flat out stunk!!!
She would scrub all of the floors then go back over them with the rinse water--the wood and linoleum did shine!
In those days if you starched anything- you had to cook it, well she would cook a BIG batch of starch and believe me we starched every curtain, doily and even the pillow cases. All of this was done in one day -- by the time Daddy got home he walked into a sparkling house that reeked of a pine forest, but hey Mom must have thought that it smelled clean. She still used it in her mop water until the end.
Well sir, it is spring and I am "fixin" to start my spring cleaning opening up the house and airing out my quilts etc. but the one thing that I won't be doing is "scrubbin" the floors--think that mopping will do me just fine --really doubt that I will go over it with rinse water and I guarantee you there will be NO pine trees added to my water!!