COMMITMENTS : THE HUMAN CONDITION : Season’s Cleanings : Clearing out the junk in our lives can be purifying. But when you’re part pack rat, part neatnik, it’s not an easy task. If we throw everything out, what will future generations have left as treasures?

It’s hard to say when spring begins in Southern California. Most years the seasons unfold like a Noh drama, with ambient winter days lengthening almost imperceptibly into dry and dusty summer.

This year was more dramatic. After January rains that brought biblical-style flooding, then pestilential mosquitoes, spring kicked open my door like John Wayne in a manly Western.

My spring instincts took somewhat longer to arouse. I knew the season was finally here when my thoughts turned to . . . spring cleaning.

By that, I don’t mean scrubbing the kitchen floor, swabbing out the shower and sweeping under our red couch where the cat hangs out.

I mean that semi-universal quirk that makes the human species embrace the idea of cleansing, of shedding an old skin, making a new start and tossing overboard the old junk that has complicated our lives.

Even rock stars have alluded to this seasonal urge.

“If there’s a bustle in your hedge row, don’t be alarmed now, it’s just a spring clean for the May Queen,” whined Led Zepplin in that famous song “Stairway to Heaven.”

Yet as much as I want to emulate the May Queen, it is only March and I have never won any tiaras for my housekeeping.

You see, I am three parts pack rat, one part neatnik. I want to both drop-kick clutter and clutch it to my breast. My idea of a really exciting afternoon is to visit a thrift shop and sift through heaps of old things.

I am filled with morbid fascination by tales of folks who collected so much junk in their homes that they had to tunnel like rodents through 12-foot piles of newspapers, old clothes and whatnot.

There but for the grace of God, I shudder.

So I go through phases where I throw things out with military precision: sagging wicker furniture, chipped plates, shoe boxes full of receipts from the 1980s.

Then there are times when I save with the zealotry of the mildly disturbed.

Food, for instance. I hate throwing away food. My husband and I wage a constant war over black bananas. He wants to fling them into the trash. Don’t, I implore, vowing to drop what I’m doing and make banana bread, which calls for exactly the type of fruit he’s eyeing with such disgust.

Chaytor Mason, an emeritus professor of psychology at USC, is doing his first spring cleaning in 40 years. Part of that involves going through boxes belonging to his late mother and aunt, which landed in his Pomona home.

“I’m finding a treasure-trove of things I had forgotten, things I didn’t know existed,” Mason says. “You find some of your own depth, things that add to your personality, when you clean.”

Mason recalls childhood springs, when he would help his mother drag carpets into the back yard, where she beat them with a wire carpet beater.

“It makes people feel better to clean, it’s self-purification, it dates back from the times of the Bible. Freud would say it’s a cathartic experience and I would say so too.”

But he says something is lost when people throw too much away.

“They lose the depth of memory that comes with reference to the past. People used to have attics. Now they have $35-per-month storage spaces.”

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Almost everyone I know has a junk drawer, overflowing with such things as paper clips, matchbooks, candle nubs, half-eaten dog biscuits and overdue library book notices. Personally, I find it soothing to relegate disarray to a designated space. That way we can keep the rest of the house relatively neat.

The trouble is, our junk drawer is an entire basement, which has become increasingly crammed since we moved in three years ago. I’m afraid I’ll wake up one day and find the stuff is flowing up the stairs and popping open the basement door like in a horror movie.

Here is a partial catalogue of our basement contents: old letters, a pancake-like futon, twice-used Christmas bows, water-stained paintings that once belonged to my great-aunt, boxes that formerly held kitchen appliances, old lamps I don’t like but might need one day.

That is the key phrase, the slippery slope down which we slide: This may come in handy one day.

Yeah, right, like the boxes of moth-eaten vintage hats. Pieces of aluminum pipe. Encrusted buckets of paint strippers, cleansers and plant food for plants that died years ago. With spring upon us, I’m eyeing that basement again. I’m envisioning neatly stacked boxes. Room for my bike. Space to walk around. I’m not alone.

Professional cleaning services say business booms this time of year.

“It’s up 30% to 40%,” estimates Ramona Robinson, a spokeswoman for Dana’s Housecleaning, which is based in the San Gabriel Valley but has 16 branches throughout California. *

Our hygiene-obsessed culture isn’t the only one that goes in for spring cleaning. It’s an old tradition prior to Chinese New Year, serving double duty to ready the home for guests and rid it of evil spirits.

Likewise, observant Jewish families turn their houses inside out in the days before Passover, making sure no crumb of bread is left. This is because Passover is a day of eating unleavened bread, commemorating the ancient flight of the Jews from Egypt, when they left in such a hurry that the bread had no time to rise.

As best I can determine, the American ritual dates from the days of coal- and wood-burning stoves. Those stoves, in constant use all winter, left a greasy, smoky film on the ceilings, walls and curtains of each room, which had to be scoured when spring came.

In my case, I hardly think the urge to clean was handed down genetically from my grandmother, who had maids and raised her elbow only to tip her cigarette holder into an ashtray.

And yet. The same feverish impulse occasionally seizes my mother, who will call and tell me she’s going through drawers of old papers, rereading my sixth-grade geography report on Hungary, an eighth-grade writing assignment titled “My Life as a Dime” and college economics tests that described the contributions of Gunnar Myrdal.

“Should I keep this?” she asks.

“Yes, please,” I respond, thinking that people will want to scrutinize my earliest writings when I become a famous novelist.

“I think you’d better come get this if you want to keep it,” says my mother, whose house these days is filling up with the cribs, toys and clothes of grandchildren. “I have to make room for Laurence’s clothes and this is a small house, you know.

We have a small house too. Yet I wonder about what is lost in our Disposable Age, in which we jettison every reminder of yesterday, not to mention 20 years ago.

Not so my parents’ generation. They saved Life magazines with John F. Kennedy’s face on the cover, 1930s-era postcards Aunt Sania sent from the Cote d’Azur, thick 78 r.p.m. records. These all gave me hours of pleasure as a child, sitting cross-legged and sneezing on the linoleum floor of our balcony, where my mother stored her dusty mementos and my father’s blood pressure boiled at the sight of all that clutter.

But what will my children turn to for tactile pleasures of an earlier age? And all because I was too impatient to save my generation’s things, to let them absorb the patina of time until they too became treasured old things, or at least curios from the last decades of the 20th Century.

A word to the spring-cleaning May Queen: Hold on to that bustle. It may come in handy one day.