You’d think that my house would be sparkling like Mr. Clean’s chrome dome after being stranded here with only groceries and the occasional trip to the mailbox to lure me outdoors for the past eight weeks, but I believe I can count on no hands the number of times that I picked up a broom or a mop during this wild and crazy pandemic … and I’m honestly not all that sad about it.

We’ve had enough to do between not dying, and not passing along a disease that we didn’t know that we might’ve been carrying, and teaching the kids how to count to circle or whatever it is that they learn in kindergarten! Couple in learning how to grumble under masks and forgetting how to put shopping carts away at the grocery store and we’ve been a busy group of pandemically challenged people this spring!

Far too busy to sort through the ever-accumulating piles of clutter that are only ever toppled by said kindergarteners who don’t know just how tipsy these piles of random junk truly are, that’s for sure, and even then let’s be honest – instead of taking the five minutes to sort 90% of them into the garbage can and then shuttling the rest to the Long Term Junk Closet™, best case scenario is we just make a new pile and then wait for it also to either get knocked over or inherited by the kids who make actually going through that garbage an impossibility here and now…

Because if there’s one thing I hate more than the clutter in my house, it’s dealing with the clutter in my house … which is how I’ll occasionally stumble across something that pre-dates my wife and I having kids six years ago and counting!

Seriously, the only reason the refrigerator gets cleaned out every once in a blue moon around here is because eventually its contents begin to smell and develop fuzzy growths if left forgotten for long enough.

In fact, the last time I did try to clean up some miscellaneous clutter, I literally just got a box and dumped everything off the table into the box and then deposited that box out into the garage under the assumption that if it hasn’t been cleaned off in years, how am I ever even going to know if I miss it or not?!

The only trouble with this approach is really that I don’t have enough boxes or enough garage space to dump anything and everything out there that hasn’t seen the light of day since an articulate president was voted into office!

And don’t get me wrong, I would’ve liked to make an impact on cleaning this place up once it was announced that infection was imminent and school was out forever.

I also would’ve liked to read a few books and go for more walks and figure out where my broom and dustpan are physically located inside of this house, but both time and Coronavirus, it seems, are fickle mistresses and soon enough one Zoom call leads to another and then we’re all eating Frosted Flakes directly out of the box for dinner wondering precisely what happened to bring us to this freaky branch of the 2020 timeline.

Of course, now that summer is right around the corner, all bets are off on cleaning – they don’t call it summer cleaning, now do they?!

If it doesn’t get sorted, dusted, filed, or dragged out to the curb by Memorial Day, it’s cleaning for 2021. I don’t make the rules, and even if I did, there are far more important areas that I would focus my regulatory powers on than house cleaning and general clutter maintenance.

No, 2020 is going to go down in the books for a lot of things, but an epic spring cleaning is not going to be one of them. Maybe 2021 will be better, although if the Goat Measles pick up as much as my amateur online epidemiology Facebook group thinks they’re going to, we might just want to call it now and aim for 2022 instead.

Wait, what’s that?

2022 is already earmarked for Fly Hard 2: Revenge of the Murder Hornets???

It really stings me to think that we might have to table this spring cleaning even longer, but at least that should give me enough time to start looking for my broom.