Reasonably Tidy

An article in today's New York Times strikes me as being more a documentation of mental illness and less an informative puff piece. It's all about those hyper-clean types who come all unglued on the subject of soap scum or the barest sign of tile-grout mold. The ones who actually own and read a copy of Martha Stewart's excruciatingly hyperbole-infested housecleaning manual. The ones who will spend a month cleaning the house, or will spend a small fortune on cleaning services, before the holiday guests arrive.

I have a tip for all those folks: as soon as your holiday guests arrive, pour them a stiff drink or two. Then they won't notice the dust that has settled in the crevasses of your dining-room-chair legs. While you're at it, have a stiff drink yourself. Or maybe three. Lighten up, get over it, and live in the world you were born in. You can't clean the world away. I know. I've gone through periods in which I tried.

I have always had a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Over the years, however, I've worked on freeing myself from its clutches. I was never a certifiably wacko type with paralyzing OCD; more just your basic fussbudget who never left the house in an unironed shirt or left a dirty dish in the sink for more than 17.5 seconds. I was a good housekeeper. I kept the joint neat and clean, vacuumed the carpets and dusted regularly. My floors sparkled. My surfaces shone. My closets told a different story: they reflected my ambivalence towards all that spic-'n'-span-iness, as they bulged and and groaned under their loads of perilously stacked crap, much of it utterly worthless, some of it more unprocessed trash than anything worth storing.

Over time I have allowed more and more disorder in the house proper. As casual household serendipity has arisen, so has my sense of peace. There is absolutely no point in my worrying about whether my glass dining room table has become slightly opaque due to a surface layer of dust. If I actually wind up using the dining room table for anything except random storage, I'll get out the Windex. Until then, the dust isn't doing anything except sitting there, often under piles of books or magazines or LPs. It's just dust, dammit, not a layer of plague bacilli.

Now, that isn't to say that I have morphed from Happy Homemaker into Filthy McNasty. Any bonafide slob would find my house intolerably neat, even though my home office doesn't have a level surface free from teetering stacks of books, papers, CDs, and other such goodies, even though the kitchen floor inevitably has a certain lived-in look about it, even though the bathroom is only casually clean and certainly not microbe-free. I don't allow too much dust to accumulate—Swiffer Dusters are among the great inventions of our era—but daily dusting just isn't in the cards.

With the departure of my dear kitty April—who passed on at the incredible age of 25, an eternity for a cat—I find I don't need to vacuum and dust as much. All that cat fur, now a thing of the past save the occasional bits and flutters that keep popping up. So the house tends to stay cleaner. Nor am I here all that much during the academic year, or if I am, I'm mostly encamped in my home office. So a weekly once-over lightly is about all I need. Or all I intend to do.

Thus have I scraped the monkey off my back, that chattering chimp that once went nova if there was dust on the entry-hall floor or the slightest hint of unseemly goo in the bathroom sink. I consider this a step forward, a declaration of independence from those bizarre and fundamentally pointless urges. After all, cleaning is one of those never-ending tasks.

I have a neighbor who takes housekeeping to Olympian levels. Her backyard garden is beyond impeccable. She spent three days out there with a steam cleaner, getting every last microbe off the cement walkways and porch. She had the entire wooden superstructure replaced—this after having had it completely repainted just a few months earlier. I always know when she's home; the vacuum is running or she's darting in and out of the backyard, hanging up her kitchen rugs for airing or bustling about with this or that project. I'm sure her house is immaculate inside. But most of the time, she's the only person there. I can't resist relaying the gossip that for years she was married to a man with a bonafide hoarding disorder. It must have been holy hell for both of them.

Ah, well. Chacun à son goût. I'm just grateful that with age I have become less addicted to a life of spit-spot. My deeper subconscious remains convinced that soap scum on the shower faucet = the first steps towards trailer-trash-dom. But I'm better now, really I am.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.