Cleaning day Monday. The time change, setting our clocks back an hour will take time to play out. A week or so at least. We're still eating our meals at the regular time. Jackie and Jillie respond to their expectations based on the times they've become accustomed to having their meals. And so do we. I've kept my stove clock on the old time. Using it as a guide for what's happening.

Glancing at it from time to time assures me that I'm right on schedule for example, in the time it takes to clean the house. And it sure takes time to clean the house. Even with Irving helping. I've given up the vacuuming long since to him. He probably does a better, more conscientious job than I do. Three floors of vacuuming.

He's finished long before I am, though. He spent a few hours down in his workshop with his stained glass giving me a chance to do the dusting upstairs before he began vacuuming. Cleaning, after all is done from the top down. Dusting first, then dry mopping, then vacuuming, and finally washing the floors. Dusting takes the longest time to complete, there's just so much to dust. Almost seventy years' worth of collecting.

And collections have an inexhaustible habit of collecting dust. But there's a bright side to everything. While I'm wielding those dusters and flicking about the items we've accumulated over the years, I'm like a curator, assessing and appreciating; 'noticing' things the presence of which we're so accustomed to we take for granted. Moving about the house cleaning focuses attention on what you're doing.

And that, even while your motions are mechanical and often your mind is free to wander about musing on any number of things. A double, triple, quadrupling-tasking mind. 

Now and again Jackie and Jillie come along to remind me they'd like to go out to the backyard. They're sniffing about, for the most part, at the snow here and there, and we imagine that it's the scent left by the rabbit. The rabbit, we noticed, has once again taken up habitation under the yew tree in the front garden;  his prints can be seen at either end of the snow tunnel he made months ago.

The last part of the cleaning ritual for Mondays is floor-washing. I use as large a sponge as I can find, a pail of soapy water and go to it. For me, that's the easiest part of house-cleaning, on my hands and knees swivelling about on the floors. Every one of which Irving laid himself over the years, replacing the original floor coverings with porcelain or marble tiles. There's the laundry room, the hallway from laundry room to powder room to kitchen. The powder room floor, the kitchen floor and the breakfast room floor.

Our upstairs bedroom bathroom and the foyer are also done. I don't bother with the upstairs guest bathroom until we actually have stay-over guests. One expected tomorrow. And nor do I wash the floors on our sub-level more than twice a year. A bathroom, and a very large recreation room. There's a smaller room that Irving put down parquet flooring in after he finished partitioning the basement, putting up walls, doing the electrical and the plumbing.

This house was his hobby project, what he looked forward to working on creatively. And for a government bureaucrat he was able to do everything and anything; it was his artistic eye and relish of physical work, planning and building. He did the same on a smaller scale in our other homes while we were raising the children. 

Well, cleaning done, I hardly felt the energy to embark on a ravine hike. But we agreed it was the best thing to do, since Jackie and Jillie could use the exercise, and frankly, so could we; that kind of exercise, leisure exercise. So off we went, on a truly beautiful day where the temperature inched up to 4C, though by then the sun which had been constant earlier had decided to retire. It did come out of retirement now and again while we were out.

Once back at home again Jackie and Jillie lined up for their afternoon vegetable salads. And I began preparing yet another soup. This time a French onion soup prefaced by a vegetable salad for us, too. I had prepared the croutons for the soup earlier in the day, so all I had to do was cut extra-old Cheddar (our preference) into slices from the block, and mince garlic and slice onions to begin the soup. We're on a bit of a soup bounce lately. The dried pea/bean/barley soup with chopped tomato and yam yesterday was really good with a focaccia bread of whole-wheat flour, sesame seed and grated cheese. Irving also had hot-smoked salmon, to round out his meal.