Clean and quiet

It's quiet tonight from the back patio.

This has something to do with it being 2:41 a.m.   No crickets, no dogs.  No planes taking off.   No drunken stragglers yelling.  Even very few cars.

Maybe it just seems more quiet than usual because I'm drinking a Sam Adams Irish Red, lounging in an Adirondack chair, surrounded by impatiens and begonias and basil (finally) planted and arranged, and looking in through a scrubbed-down window into an apartment that, over the last 6 hours, I stripped free of winter parkas and dozens of rinsed-out tin cans from the dish drainer and New Yorkers from November 2008 and dust and cat litter and dried footprints from some February slush storm. 

Spring cleaning -- even 2 full months after spring began -- always produces this high.  The high that makes me stay up past 2 a.m. changing the duvet cover and sheets, then crawling on my hands and knees through the apartment with a sponge and bucket, just so I can go to sleep (muscles exhausted, on the clean sheets) knowing I'll wake up tomorrow morning and the red wood of my kitchen floor will reflect the morning sun and the image of my cats lounging on it, waiting for their breakfast.

Love it.