Spring, not here yet, but remembering many years ago, coming home from Emerson School, going in that beautiful old house, and smelling wallpaper cleaner, a sign of Spring. It signaled a steady stream of Spring activities.
Taking out the storm windows and putting in screens, and, that old house had many windows. It meant taking out the glass panels in our "breezeway" and replacing them with screens. And Mom would eventually gather up all the "Winter" clothes and blankets, and pack them away in a cedar chest.
It meant that our old coal furnace did not to be fed, and no coal deliveries, where a whole truckload of coal would be dumped down our coal chute, and no more hot clinkers to be taken out to cool. I remember for a time, Dad had a man take the hot clinkers out of the furnace and pile them up to cool. The last time he did it, he apparently had to go to the bathroom, and rather than coming upstairs, he urinated on the hot coals. It was a long time before that awful odor was removed from the house.
And, no school, and a whole, long, endless Summer ahead. Summers were a lot longer when I was seven. We had those long hot Summer days which we don't have any more, they come and go quickly now.
I don't think anyone does wallpaper any more, so need for wallpaper cleaner. I don't even know if you can purchase it at Walmart. It had a marvelous odor to it. They used ladders to get the ceilings, and that old house had very high ceilings. You had no idea how dirty the wallpaper had gotten until you started "erasing" the dirt. We cooked with gas and heated with coal, so the walls got really dirty. Big rooms downstairs, five bi bedrooms upstairs, a lot of paper to clean.
I think it was Irma Bombeck, journalist ad author, who incidentally was from Dayton, my home, wrote a book once, "There's A Fly In This Room," and how that signaled all of the events leading up to Summer. Not yet, here in Ohio, weatherman indicates a possible snow yet. At least the days are longer.
