So, I will stand up and admit it. I LIKE having a clean home. I LIKE clean corners and orderly pantries and organized bookshelves. I LIKE a clean sink, fresh sheets and a tidy laundry room.
There is a book that is helping to give me the courage to make these confessions. From our local library, I borrowed Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson, a book that was recommended by several of my blog visitors. So far it has been, to me, more riveting than almost any novel I've read in the past ten years. Her words are insightful, encouraging and well-written.
One of the stories she relates in Chapter 1 is given the heading "Born Too Late:"
I was raised to be a rural wife and mother, but I was born to late to find many openings for farm wives. Until I was thirteen, I lived in the Appalachiansouthwest corner of Pennsylvania, for most of the time on a working farm where I received an old-fashioned domestic education quite unlike the experience of the
average girl in the 1950s. Early on, I learned baby care, housecleaning, laundering, gardening, cooking, embroidering, knitting, and sewing. I slopped the pigs, herded the cows, and helped out with the
milking. I was proud to be able to pin a cloth diaper around a baby when I was six, and cook breakfasts of eggs, bacon, toast and coffee for a large family and the hired help when I was nine.
Because housekeeping skills got respect in my world, I looked forward to keeping a house of my own one day. It was what I wanted.
The words that stand out to me in this passage are "proud," "respect," "looked forward" and "WANTED." This reinforces for me that the art of keeping a house is all about the attitude. And why would we have a good attitude about providing a clean, loving environment for our family, our friends, ourselves? Our culture offers very little respect for this aspiration. Focus is given to the visual, the aesthetic. If it looks good, it is good. Many of us define a clean house by what we visual from the decorating books and magazines over which we drool, lusting after their almost unattainable perfection as if it were pornography. We have been sold a bill of goods. A beautiful home requires one of two things, or possibly both: a lot of money for fancy furnishings and/or endless drudgery.
My dear friend Penny has been an inspiration to me since I met her almost five years ago. She does not just keep house. She creates environments. Stepping inside her home evokes a feeling of just that--home. There are no fancy furnishings in her farmhouse. In fact, the majority of her home is appointed with second-hand furniture that has been refinished by her husband and life-partner, Richard. There is simplicity, order, a welcoming air. It exudes from her kitchen, her barn, her gardens. For her, it has been a passion since she first began tending a home as a child. She has always loved creating environments, and she neither rebels against nor balks at her passions. She accepts them, cooperates with them. Indeed, she embraces them. I believe it is this attitude, not the degree of work or the amount of money she spends on the care and keeping of her home. For her, it is both an art and a science.
I recall a revelation I had years ago which I'm sure Penny would support. I planted a very showy vegetable garden, eager for the nostalgia of my own grandmother's massive garden. I had very little actual gardening experience, and most of what I knew I had learned from books or gleaned from my parents' gardening. I had an area tilled that was probably ten times the area I actually needed for a garden, and I planted ten times as many vegetable plants and seeds as I could actually use or even harvest. That spring, our weather provided weeks without rain, and then weeks with nothing but. My tiny seedlings that had struggled to grow during the period without rain were soon engulfed in weeds. I was embarrassed, mortified. I was not concerned for the health of each plant, but instead for the appearance of the garden. I spent oodles of energy hoeing and pulling weeds from the paths between the rows of corn, tomatoes, and beans, yet the seedlings continued to yellow, failing to thrive. On my hands and knees, I studied a tiny stalk of corn. It was literally being choked by the weeds surrounding its roots. While I has succeeded in making my garden attractive by clearing neat paths between the rows, the plants themselves were suffering.
That's when the revelation came to me: tend the plant, not the environment.
That lesson has continued to present itself to me as I work to care for my family. I can clear the floors, organize the toys, make the meals and fold the laundry, but if my focus is merely on the aesthetic, I'm not truly caring for my family. I'm only attempting to make a show of it.
Cheryl Mendelson talks about my kind of housekeeping in her book:
People who think badly of themselves take these feelings out on their
homes...just as they may put excess stress on personal appearance in an effort
to overcome self-doubt, so they may make their homes look forbiddingly perfect
in an attempt to impress themselves and others.
While my home is not forbiddingly perfect (far from it!) the attitude is the same. Tend to the environment. That strategy fails miserably. Not only do the seedlings in my care suffer, in spite of my vain attempts, the environment still suffers, too.
I don't believe that Cheryl, or Penny, or you or I were born too late. I believe that we live in a culture that is on the cusp of remember why keeping a home is an important role, a science, an art. I believe respect for that role is on the rise.
And so, I am on a journey to embrace my longings, to rediscover my passions and to encourage that respect.
Care to join me?
