We’re not big spring cleaning people, to be honest. With two dogs and two boys, we probably should be, but it’s those same dogs and boys who usually leave us too run ragged to do much of anything besides kick the fur/cereal under the couch and move along. Our cleaning bursts tend to arrive from abject necessity — snowstorm, spilled milk (we cry, reader), dog v. rug, dog v. backyard — rather than wondering what to do with a Saturday that yawns open before us. Our Saturdays rarely yawn.

On that First Warm Saturday, though — which, by rule, cannot come in January or February; any scattered 70-degree days there are anomalies — we go digging for the ratty swimsuits, make a bucket of dish soap, and head out onto the porch to scrub away a season’s worth of grime. Where are we? A double-digit day in March, probably. Some stuff has bloomed, but not all; the 10-day forecast says it’s certainly too soon to put the firewood caddy back down in the basement. But on this day, it’s warm, truly warm, and meals need to be eaten outside, books read on the silly outdoor sofa probably more suited to complementing an above-ground pool, rugs hosed off (hey! look how clean that came!) in the driveway.

illustration by Ed Fotheringham

It’s slow work, but that’s fine. Spring training on the radio, the boys out helping, the moment when it all turns into a water fight not so far away. Just regular Dawn, like they use for birds in oil spills, diluted and scrubbed on and hosed back off. Was it last year the boys were old enough to do the ladder work on their own? Is this the year we actually hang a ceiling fan out here? Pre-second rescue dog, we lived out here, so this must, then, be the year we actually train this untrainable beast (she does not even turn her head when you call her name) to sit out here with us. We wash the rocking chairs and the sofa frame, and brush the last dead leaves out of the corners of the cushions.

We hang the lights back up — bistro bulbs that replaced a strand of 300 white wedding lights my buddy dropped off one year with a note: The Boys will figure out what to do with these. We hung them during the height of the pandemic and have been porch-light people most seasons ever since. We need those lights late into long summer nights, but we need them more now, in spring, when the evening still comes on relatively early.

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North Carolina weather seems purpose-built to break your heart: Our shoulder seasons swing so unpredictably back and forth that I warn my not-from-here first-year college students about it. My own boys now know that we’ll almost always lose that first truly cool fall week to a tropical system; they know, too, that we’ve pushed it a couple of times and had a fire in the fireplace as late as Memorial Day. March, for its part, always sucker-punches: The dogwoods bloom, or the saucer magnolias, and then there’s a week that’s 47 degrees and rain.

But this is not that week, not yet. This is the day that conjures those blooms in the first place, a day filled with promise and hope and nasty, filthy rags that the boys are now chasing each other around with. Some friend comes by on a bike and off the kids go, and now it’s just my wife and me left to put everything back in its place, the rocking chairs just so, and the plant stands, if not the plants. The lights are strung evenly enough for tonight, and that decision about the ceiling fan can wait.

This is the day that conjures dogwood and magnolia blooms, a day filled with promise and hope.

It’s not perfect, this First Warm Saturday cleaning, and it needn’t be. The pollen is yet to come, as are several storms that may find our outdoor items unsecured. We’re looking for clean enough: a sofa you’re happy to sit on, a table upon which you’d happily rest a glass.

Maybe our muscles are a little sore, but it’s of the happy sort, a decent day’s work done and, unlike so many kinds of work, an easy, obvious result. We’ll sit out here and wait for the boys to come home. We won’t go in until it’s fully dark. Even then, we’ll pull together something simple for dinner, leash up the bad dog and the good dog, and come back out to sit in the lights of a mostly clean porch — on a night that’s lying to us, in the best way, about what weather’s yet to come.