After multiple days this week of riding to work when the weather was a very fresh -10°C, the thermometer reached 13° yesterday and was even slightly warmer today. Suddenly, there’s spring, or at least the beginnings of it. The warmth and slightly overcast sky made for excellent weather to engage in the spring cleaning task that I enjoy more than I would like to admit: cleaning my bike.

Please understand, there are right and wrong ways to clean a bike and I’m fairly certain that I do everything pretty close to the wrong way. There are tools one can buy, of course, and the toothbrush method probably does a bit of harm alongside the good, but it works for me. We have a stand that I could use to save myself the bending and crouching, but that involves taking the other bike off the stand, where it lives during the winter, and securing the heavier bike that is ridden daily. Q-tips are probably not a recommended tool by any bike shop, but they are remarkably effective, even if I’m constantly wishing they could do the job just a little bit better. The chain would be cleaner given the proper tool, but there we are again with the tools.

It’s fair to say I do a mediocre job with my sponges and dish cloth, but the bike rides much more smoothly when I’m done. And my back recovers after a bit of stretching. It’s remarkable how much grime accumulates in the winter. I clean my bike much more regularly in warm weather, which is probably why the first spring cleaning is always such a shock. But it’s also the cleaning that is the most immediately noticeable.

Just like the first little flowers.