How did I get so slovenly? Can I blame it on my upbringing, fraught with stringent housekeeping rules and rigorous cleaning chores from an early age? Is it the necessary byproduct of a creative temperament? Or am I just lazy?
I leave my dishes in the sink, on the table, or worse yet, in the bed. I toss my coat on the back of the nearest chair and my shoes in the middle of the floor. I tuck my keys wherever I’ll be least likely to find them again, and I abandon my purses in the seats of grocery carts as a karmic test to the next shoppers.
The cheese and cracker crumbs on the kitchen counter are mine, the stray toothpaste cap was my doing, and my coat pockets are overflowing with forgotten lipsticks, receipts, stray beads, and hairy lintballs.
Don’t jump to conclusions. My home is a pretty place. For one thing, my partner keeps house like a doting granny. But even I value a beautiful, orderly environment enough to work against my own nature. I clean in fiery, maniacal bursts. The bleachy smell of a clean bathroom lifts my spirits. I paint, I arrange, I rearrange, and most of all, I hide things. I am a lover of drawers, especially. Some people use desk drawers for pens, pencils, and paper clips. Mine are stuffed with more fascinating debris: yarn bracelets, loose potpourri, candle stubs, rocks, stale candy, paper wads, photos, sugar cubes, grapefruit oil, empty match books.
My younger sister, a self-described obsessive, finds this intolerable, and has long claimed that my tender-heartedness toward little dishes and baskets and bowls of odds and ends with no discernible purpose—pretty or not—is the root of all evil. But I’m not convinced. Sometimes doo-dads pay off. A few years ago, I got seized by the irrational impulse to clean out the kitchen junk drawer in the wee hours of Christmas Eve. I was short of cash, and worried about the modest sum of money I’d spent on gifts for my kids and family, and maybe I was channeling that anxiety into the desire to make the house perfectly tidy right into its crevices. In any case, when I’d finally emptied the drawer, wiped out the last crumb, and sorted every coin, coupon, scrap, petrified gum stick, and old check stub, I discovered one stub that was in fact an uncashed check from two years prior, for exactly the amount I had just spent on Christmas.
So while a dear, well-meaning friend once whispered to me in a cautious way that life’s journey is less stressful in a clean car, I find something potent about small pockets of clutter, something fertile. When left undisturbed for long enough, they become still life artifacts of the past in a way a journal can never quite achieve. Recently I emptied out a closet to move my enormous and unwieldy collection of clothes from one hanging rack to another, and I discovered an old handbag that I haven’t used, according to the receipts it contained, since 1998.
The zinc throat lozenges had liquefied in their wrappers and the lacy ankle socks are now far too small for anyone in the family, reminding me with a cold punch that I no longer carry anybody else’s tiny socks on my person. But the four dollars in loose change was legal tender, and the small pewter statuette of the Virgin Mary was an enigma.
Based on my own eccentricities I cannot very well expect my kids to be neatniks, nor have I loaded them up with chore charts or subjected them to the dreaded ritual of Saturday morning housework. My guidelines are far less clear but ultimately more authentic for a slob like me: Put your shoes away when you walk into the house and help out cheerfully when you’re asked. Most of the time, this works fine.
It’s not too hypocritical and it reflects the basic standards I set when my oldest child was just learning how to speak and think and sort out the oddities of growing up with a mother like me. We were riding in the car, me at the wheel and she in her car seat, and she dropped whatever sticky thing she was eating onto the car floor. She shrieked for me to pull over and give it back to her.
“No,” I explained, “you can’t eat it now. It’s dirty.”
“I don’t care!” she yelled. “I like dirt!”
“But Sophie,” I reasoned. “It’s on the floor of the car, it’s covered with icky stuff.”
“Like what?” she demanded.
“Like . . . dog hair,” I offered.
She contemplated in silence before pointing out that we did not have a dog. Fair enough. But she did quiet down, and as far as I can tell, I convinced her to avoid eating scraps from floor mats, which is good enough for me.
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