Spring Cleaning?
I’ve been crushing
on simplicity lately. Mostly this is an Internet Affair, reading about other
people’s efforts to purge their homes of unneeded dreck. The best on this
subject is our former girlfriend (Joshilyn Jackson)’s hilarious blog about getting her things in order and (not
coincidentally) how her brain works. I am similarly disposed. I love the idea
that I too could pare down my belongs to 126 items.
Graham Hill
appears even more minimalist (though actually only by 30 square feet per
human).
Both make similar
points. It’s easy to be consumed by your stuff.
My brain is both
obsessed and oppressed by the items in our house that require tending.
Somewhere between a curator and lion-tamer, it’s up to me to notice that the
roof is leaking, the doors are creaking, the toilets need cleaning and the pool
is greening.
I realized, on
Sunday, as I wrote down the plague of tasks crowding my brain, a catalog of
plebian demands that ranged from medicating the dog to replacing moth traps,
that I am married, not to my husband, but to my house.
That’s why they call
us housewives! Am I the only
idiot who never noticed this perfectly obvious and not at all accidental
phraseology?
Apparently not, for
when I repeated my ephiphany to several women friends, they too seemed
gobsmacked by the sinister accuracy of this seemingly tame term. We hadn’t
noticed. It was as if we’d signed a contract back when we were too delirious
with nesting instincts to notice what we were doing. I can just imagine Snidely
Whiplash asking, “But what did you think you were agreeing to, my child?
How much more clear can one compound word be?”
Worse than my giddy
dismissal of the terms of the initial contract was my collusion in acquiring
the items that now cry for dusting, ditching, folding, or mending. I had
Stockholm Syndrome except it was Ikea Infatuation. When the Pottery Barn
catalog arrived at the house, there I was, panting over it like a teenage boy
with the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Both of my kids were dragged to
Target, on safaris for Real Simple organizing bins, Shabby Chic sheets and
lavender candles, all in the aim of creating a serene environment that once
created, would be self-tending and permanent.
That was my
mistake. Nothing is permanent. Entropy happens. Towels fray, sheets tear,
upholstery wears and paint smears. It all needs redoing, and all the redoing
falls to the idiot who fell for it all in the first place. When they talk about
the great circle of life, they don’t mention the revolving door of daily
drudgery a.k.a “Sisyphus does dishes.”
In other words,
maintenance is a bitch. Whether its our writing or our roof or our dog or even
our children, one must give up time and the illusion of perfection to embrace
the fact that no one gets out of here without a few dents and scrapes. The old
saying, in the go-go Eighties was “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Now
it’s replaced by a more Eastern outlook, “True wealth is wanting less than you
have.”
I’m all for
that, except when it comes right down to it, decluttering takes time and
downsizing takes might, and in the interim, I’ll have to settle for imaginary
flight to a place in my mind hosting “all you can pretend, all the time.” Which
is why, I suppose, I am a writer of fiction in the first place. I wander my
roost sighing at the facts, all entropic, all the time, circling like gnats or
the belfry’s lost bats, seeking containment, a reorganization, into the
illusion of story where every thing is meant to be, and it will, at least on
the page, remain in its place for ever and ever.
