“This sense of being at home is important to everyone’s well-being. If you do not get enough of it, your happiness, resilience, energy, humor, and courage will decrease. It is a complex thing, an amalgam. In part, it is a sense of having special rights, dignities, and entitlements—and these are legal realities, not just emotional states. It includes familiarity, warmth, affection, and a conviction of security. Being at home feels safe; you have a sense of relief whenever you come home and close the door behind you, reduced fear of social and emotional dangers as well as of physical ones. When you are home, you can let down your guard and take off your mask. Home is the one place in the world where you are safe from feeling put down or out, unentitled, or unwanted. It’s where you belong, or, as the poet said, the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. Coming home is your major restorative in life.”
— Cheryl Mendelson, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Housekeeping
It took me long enough to get around to reading Home Comforts, but it was inevitable I would delve into it sooner or later. No dyed-in-the-wool homebody can resist it, once its existence has become known. Encyclopedic, comprehensive, even a bit intimidating, this is the housekeeping book to end all housekeeping books, not just a compendium of information and tips, but an entire philosophy of what it means to care for a home, far beyond any simplistic notions of mere cooking-and-cleaning drudgery. “Housekeeping creates cleanliness, order, regularity, beauty, the conditions for health and safety, and a good place to do and feel all the things you wish and need to do and feel in your home” writes Mendelson, reflecting precisely my mindset when it comes to taking care of my home and why I value housekeeping far beyond mere fuss-budget cleanliness.
Because it is important. It dwells at the very core of what it means to live the good life—by which I don’t mean a morally good life, but a good life that knows comfort and belonging and fulfillment. Good housekeeping can’t create happiness just in and of itself, probably, but a well-maintained home is unlikely to get in the way of happiness, while the very process of maintaining one’s living space can provide an important emotional outlet. Whether the home is a one-room apartment or a multilevel suburban house, the arts of housekeeping are anything but dreary necessities. To take care of one’s home is to assert one’s inner jewel, to make a statement that living is far more sophisticated than merely surviving. To take care of one’s home is to take care of oneself, to establish an ordered refuge amidst the chaos.
Ensuring the continued functioning of that refuge provides a grounding in rightness. To come home to a tidy house, to a clean bedroom and a made bed, to food in the pantry and in the refrigerator, to a maintained lawn and garden, is to claim refuge anew. The journey itself is essential to that grounding. Just making one’s bed in the morning before leaving for work is making an investment in the immediate future: it’s for tonight when I get home. When I get home. A refuge is a refuge only if you can return to it.
Just learning the ins and outs of housekeeping can be a pleasurable adventure in and of itself. It’s useful knowledge, applicable, practical, and real. Like many worthwhile practices it is a techne—i.e., a craft that is honed via practice, such as making a good clay pot or playing the piano. If one’s livelihood is spent in relatively cerebral pursuits, as mine is, house tasks ensure that I don’t make like the Worm of Ourobouros and disappear down my own gullet. After the ecstasy, the laundry, says Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. Ultimately his message is that the two are one and the same, both vehicles for mindfulness and growth. Washing the dishes is like washing the baby Buddha, says Vietnamese monk-teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.
The cyclic nature of housekeeping establishes its own comforting tempo. The daily allegro of cooking-kitchen-bathroom is complemented by the weekly andante, itself encompassed by the adagio through largo rounds of monthly, seasonal, yearly. The sun traces out its north-sound band over the year and the housekeeping cycle matches right in step. Some of the actual tasks may have changed over time but the fundamental iteration remains. Housekeeping is a life activity, a regularized rondo that complements all of our other reiterative activities.
The lawn grows back after the most meticulous mowing; clothes become soiled no matter how careful the laundering. Bathrooms, kitchens, carpets, you name it: they’ll all need regular attention. Appliances have finite lifespans and will require replacing. Furniture will wear out or break. Live in a house long enough and almost everything will need replacing or upgrading. Our home mirrors ourselves: we are all impermanent, subject to decay. But just as we can aim to make the best of our limited time via beneficial lifestyle choices, we can extend good health practices to our own home, minimize its inner and outer decay and render it as wholesome as possible.
A friend of mine once observed: even if I should be reduced to living in a box under the freeway, my box will have a window with curtains. To which I might add: furthermore, my box will be meticulously clean and well-organized.