to see your
house catch fire.” ~ Wendell Berry
While seated in my office on this first day of a new year, I dare
to glance around a room so cluttered that I’m reminded of an over-stuffed
refrigerator. I wonder if any of it is alive. My chaos has grown since last
January and the niggling side of my brain is screaming, “KISS: Keep it simple,
stupid.
I count Post-it notes stuck here and there but stop at 266. Most
of them were “posted” to remind me of a party long since passed or somebody’s
birthday. Oops!
If I try real hard I can manage to avert my eyes from the two
nasty-looking cups of cold coffee or the pile of unopened snail mail scattered
around.
A not-so-quick inventory exposes eleven pairs of cheap reading
glasses, a dental floss container way too knotted up to be useful, four
long-standing unpaid bills, pencils and pens too numerous to count, a can of
air freshener used for counteracting the after-effects of my Chinese lunches,
and a Partridge in a Pear Tree. Six empty boxes stare back at me with an
attitude. Pretty soon, I expect the CDC, decked out in bio-chemical suits, to storm
the place.
I pick up a diffused asthma inhaler under a pile of printouts that
should have been pitched last February. Holding it up to the light, I wonder
whose it is and if they survived the last attack. I don’t have asthma; neither
does my husband Babe.
A cleaning lady shows up every two weeks. I always hear her stopping
outside my closed office door listening for sounds of life within. No doubt she
wonders what illegal or illicit things I am up to in this room to which she has
been forbidden entry. Being a sloppy office keeper is not illegal and I
guarantee that it’s not illicit.
I love my mess, my clutter, my thousands of Post-it Notes. Other
areas of my home might pass the white glove test because I’m a good
picker-upper. Not by Martha Stewart standards, and not by the principles set
forth by my friend Hannah, well-known for color coordinating cold cuts. I’d
rather reserve the slapdash, slovenly side of myself to dump inside my little space.
I’m just fine with that as long as the CDC stays in Atlanta where they belong.
Hannah, aka Hannah Homemaker, is the antithesis of me. Give her twenty-four
hours and she could make Martha Stewart’s empire drop out of sight. Hannah
cooks supper before she eats breakfast; bakes bread every day, and vacuums her
carpet long before the warranty has expired.
Her shelves are not lined with ordinary shelf paper, but with
fabric that coordinates with her china. Once a week she removes everything from
the cabinets in order to wash, starch and iron the matching liners. When you
picture that, does the term, OCD come your mind? Hello?
Occasionally, I’ve been known to ask Babe if he would love me more
if I were like Hannah Homemaker. “What if I baked pies and bread instead of
buying the day-old stuff?”
He wrinkles his brow and takes far too long to answer. Babe does
stuff like to make me think he is clever. I pretend to be impressed. It’s a
gift.
“Are you talking about my mother’s rhubarb pie recipe made from
scratch? Rolled out dough ~ not the frozen kind?”
“Rhubarb pie? Get
serious, Babe.”
“Well, how about baking bread like my mother use to do?”
“What are you, twelve? Bread, schemed.” I dangle a packaged loaf
of store-bought bread in his face. “If it's good enough for Little Miss
Sunbeam, then it’s plenty good enough for us.”
Babe folds his eyebrows into deep pleats. Clearly, the man’s tush
is in the proverbial crack. He knows it; I know it. He must come up with an
answer along the same lines as the one I expect when I ask, “Do these jeans
make my butt look too big?”
He clears his throat. “As long as you don’t force-feed me hog
jowls or slip chitterlings in my oatmeal, and you don’t expect me to wade
through the creepy stuff growing inside your office, I won’t trade you in for Hannah
Homemaker.”
Looking around the room again, I decide to KISS ~ live with my
collection of chaos till 2014. Privacy is way hard to find these days.
!
