The other day I was visiting a friend at their house for the first time. This house was clean.
Not just in the sense that it was recently dusted and there were no dishes in the sink. That, but also no clutter. The kitchen counters were bare (how?). The living room looked like a magazine shoot – not just elegant but no knickknacks, no magazines. The family room TV hid behind a cabinet and the blankets were folded in a corner, the coffee table a smooth shining expanse of nothingness.
It was some kind of miracle.
The next day I was hanging out with my cousin and his wife and they got to talking about how retirement is looming, so they’ve been aggressively cleaning out their house. Garbage bags full of stuff on its way out, their basement emptied and ready for house showings. The possibility of living abroad or travelling with literally everything they owned a real possibility.
I admit I was envious of both.
My house is in need of a cleaning on the surface level, and also underneath. Everywhere I look there is clutter – bank papers waiting for me to magically understand them before I can somehow find space for them in the filing cabinet, counters covered with an assortment of 50 types of tea and vitamins I’ll forget to take otherwise. Puzzles overflowing the so-called puzzle nook, waiting for my attention, and books – so many books! – stacked beside beds and family room chairs and next to bookshelves that just cannot accommodate them.
Oh, to live life clean, to live life with such focus and direction that you wake up each day to a clean slate and can decide what to think about, instead of having a million thoughts thrust upon you.
But the truth is, that’ll never be me, because I’m a scatterbrain, and I honestly don’t mean that in any kind of negative way. My brain scatters to the four winds at all times. Plans for tomorrow, next week, next year all live in there at once. It’s a tornado of creative projects and words coming in and words coming out and new thoughts and forward motion. It’s this but also that and that as well, and did I mention this other thing?
To me the world is so full of so many amazing things, so many experiences, that I want them all (cue Barbra Streisand: the world is juicy, juicy, and you see, I gotta have my bite, sir). And if my house is a visual representation of the inside of my brain – colours swirling, silly trinkets flashing, every outfit I tried on this week that didn’t quite fit and so lies discarded like a parade of who I was and who I might be again lying on the bedroom floor – then that’s maybe not so bad.
TurtleHead 
I have no idea how people get a clean house like that. None. I’ve never been able to manage it – def not with kids and still not now with an empty nest. I admire it and it feels like “this is how real adults should live” but I seem to be incapable of it myself. Total envy on that one.
OMG YES to this. I always feel like my house looks like a university dorm house and I’m a failure at adulting. But in the end, perhaps “success at adulting” isn’t the accomplishment we think it is :).
And I still have hand-me-down furniture too – and Ikea!!! So maybe this isn’t the hallmark standard for adulting? Though I’m not sure what is LOL.
When the pandemic started I thought to myself that this was the perfect opportunity to *finally* clean up the disaster that is my office. I ordered bookshelves from IKEA, collected a bunch of junk to throw out, cleaned up my desk… and then the whole project sort of lost momentum (even with the pandemic still raging). Today it’s better than before, but still pretty frightful. And I finally decided that I’m OK with that. At any given time I could continue cleaning and organizing, but time is still at a premium, and there are so many other things that *need* to get done, or even that I *want* to do and make me happy. Cleaning doesn’t fall into either of those categories, unless it gets to a point where it’s hard to do the stuff I care about doing. That’s the time when I will do a bare minimum of cleanup, and probably feel good about it, and then I will happily go back to my life full of worthwhile things to do.
Same. I really thought I’d clean out the whole house during the pandemic and I started well, I think I did a few closets but man, it just doesn’t give enough joy to sustain the process. I have to be avoiding something else terrible to want to clean!
Years ago when my kids were younger I remember reading that a house is a reflection of your mind. I looked up at my surroundings. There were skis leaned up beside the front door from a family day of skiing, there was homework piled on the family room coffee table, our walls were filled of pictures of our activities together. There was a lot of clutter, and definitely lots of dust because I was too busy having fun with my kids to clean. It thought, “Yep, I’m good with this.”
A couple years later my son when to the house of a friend from school to work on a group project. The house a large home in an upscale neighbourhood. I picked him up after and asked what the house was like inside. He said, “It was nice, but I would never want to live there. It was so big and . . . clean.” I laughed, because I think he meant clean in the “sterile and lacking in fun” sense. Again, I’m good with it.
Yes this!! I am kind of proud of the fact that my house reflects the way my mind dips in and out of ALL THE THINGS all the time and all day long. It’s a good thing!
Lynn, what a creative and evocative way to express self-awareness! Love the imagery. Plus, any time you quote Babs I’m with ya!
Lee Ann
Life’s candy and the sun’s a ball of butter! 🙂
Hoooo boy, yes. I’ve struggled with this for so long. Well, maybe not so long, because when I was younger I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about clutter. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten a bit less comfortable with clutter, partly because it makes me anxious. But this means straightening up and containerizing and then putting whatever’s left at right angles, not getting rid of everything that makes us us. I was so sick of reading about minimalism and then finally read a house-organizing person that said “don’t go too far – you don’t want to be living in a hotel room” and yeah, that part. I love visiting my friend Zarah whose house is clean and sparingly decorated and full of soothing neutrals, but only for a visit. One of my book club friends came when the kids were little and there was art lying everywhere and glitter footprints on the stairs and she said “it’s like constant Mardi Gras over here”, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment, but I took it as one anyway.