You may have noticed, Cow Pasture Chronicles has a new look. I hope you enjoy the    change. I sat down at my desk on Saturday with a plan to write. First, of course, I needed  to catch up on all the emails I’d missed while at the beach. It’s amazing how fast they can accumulate and overwhelm you, isn’t it?

I opened the cabinet above my desk for an item and froze. I am an admitted organization nerd and a notebook neurotic, but my cabinets looked like organized chaos. The next thing I knew, I had emptied them of all contents and had cleaning supplies in one hand and a sponge in the other. Writing had become a distant, fleeting thought. An occurrence happening all too often these days.

“What in the world are you doing?” My husband asked, wading through the contents I’d spread across the entire kitchen.

“Spring cleaning,” I said, my voice muffled from deep inside the cabinet. I cleaned like the Pope was coming to inspect.

“I thought you were going to work on your book?” He is forever nudging, no make that prodding, me to finish my work in progress (WIP).

I pulled my head out and glared. “I was planning to work on my blog, not my book.”

“So what happened?” He pointed to the mess.

I looked around, brushed my hair from my face and sank into the nearest chair. “A squirrel,” I said.

His brow furrowed in confusion and worry. “Squirrels?”

“Yeah,  you know the kind that hijack your thoughts and hide them like nuts for winter storage. I call mine Jennie.”

He shook his head, grabbed a coke from the fridge. “Whatever,” he said as he headed toward the den.

It’s in the genes. Come Spring, I can’t help myself. I grew up with a woman, my mom Jennie, who believed Windex and newspapers, floor wax, cleaning supplies and rags came out the same time  with the flowers and pollen every year. She’d wake us on a Saturday morning, bright and early, hand us rags and our marching orders and Spring cleaning would commence.

We washed windows, stripped the hardwood floors, applied new wax, scrubbed base-boards, and grout in the bathroom tile (with a toothbrush). We washed and spruced everything in the house and when it when done, we opened the sparkling new windows to let the fresh new air flow into our lungs. We inhaled that fresh air like a dying man sucking on his oxygen tube.

It may sound harsh, but with five girls we got to where we could knock the list out in a day ( I have no memory of my brother with a rag in his hand) and I am a hell of a housekeeper.

It took me all day (not as fast as I once was) to finish reorganizing. Exhausted, I pulled off my rubber gloves and resumed reading emails. Where I promptly opened this article from The Daily Post,  “Spring cleaning: Reorganizing Your Blog.“  Well…what can I say. The squirrel was loose.

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