Martha Stewart has somewhere among her alphabetized, laminated files, a list of all the chores you are supposed to do in your house and how often you're supposed to do them. I'm sure. In fact, on her website, I found no fewer than eight separate checklists for homekeeping: linen closets, kitchens, baths, periodicals, craft supplies and more. I found a list of six chores I should be doing every day. These include picking up clutter, sorting the mail, making the beds, cleaning as you cook, wiping spills and stains while they're fresh and sweeping the floor after dinner is cleaned up. I would also add doing a load of laundry, but that's just me. The picking up clutter one amuses me the most: we are instructed to scan a room every time we enter it, look for things that are out of place, and put them in their places immediately. (Okay, I guess I could do that) But here's the kicker: insist everyone in your house do the same.
Stop laughing. Seriously. Now.
My children have never met Martha Stewart, so they do not know they should fear her. Nor has Ms. Stewart ever met my children. And she has only one daughter, who by all accounts is nearly as perfect as her mother. So, in short, Ms. Stewart has never encountered a room resembling an exploded Lego factory, TBall equipment that seems to roam the house of its own accord, school supplies, coloring books, crayons, Bakugan, books, and other assorted crap that accumulates in my house. I have this sneaking suspicion that Ms. Stewart's daughter had tea with her dolly queen and made scones out of organic imagination. So, while theoretically picking up a room every time I walk into it seems like a good idea, it also seems, you know, theoretical.
Another one of my favorite 'homekeeping sites,' flylady.net suggests that every day I have a gleaming kitchen sink. Her rationale is that a clean sink will deter me from letting dishes pile up, give the kitchen an overall impression of clean and order. In fact, she posts 31 Baby Steps to achieve cleanliness in your house in one month, putting an end to "CHAOS: Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome." These baby steps include keeping a control journal, picking out the next day's clothes before bed, cleaning one area intensely for two minutes, and establishing a day's order to help make every task small so that all the jobs don't morph into one overwhelming episode of reality TV about hoarding.
Before I proceed, I'd like to address the vocabulary from these expert house minders: "homekeeping" "control journal." Homekeeping? Really, Martha? Living in the Hamptons with designer velvet furnishings and white carpeting is homekeeping. Trying to keep two domestic terrorists from turning the whole house upside down every day is sustainable living: as in, I try to sustain living every day.
In the end, I should be, it appears, spending more time on homekeeping than I actually do. Which is alarming, because I spend (it seems) an awful lot of time homekeeping. How could I ever do my six daily things from Martha, my 31 Baby Steps to a zen house from flylady, make a 30 minute meal from Rachael Ray, follow my Your Baby Can Read instructions, train my dog to not run out an open door like the Dog Whisperer, domesticate my children with the help of Super Nanny, find out what books to read from Oprah, landscape my backyard like Ty Pennington and still have time to watch my beloved Bones?
To quote another TV nugget of advice: CALGON, TAKE ME AWAY!
This morning when the tilers came to demolish my existing tile, they had to remove the toilet, the washer, the dryer, the dishwasher, the trash compactor, the refrigerator, and the stove. So, you know, nothing I use or anything. While those major appliances were out of commission and away from the walls, I thought, "I bet Martha Stewart has advice for the maintenance of these things. I bet I can clean them and prepare them to be put back to work even better than before."
I was thinking about vacuuming dryer vents, refrigerator coils, wiping down areas never exposed to my sight.
When they pulled the refrigerator away from the wall, I thought I would cry. There was matted, dusty, dingy....fur?....that most closely resembled road kill. And not small road kill, either. Like big, dead, well-fed raccoons. These were not your ordinary dustbunnies. These were dusthares. On steroids. My vacuum choked and sputtered and had to be emptied every other minute.
And the worst part was, I kept thinking, my house is clean. It is. It's swept, vacuumed and mopped 3 times a week. My house is clean. I run dishes. I run the laundry. My house is clean. I clean out the pantry. I sort through the trash. I don't let piles of crap grow and grow. And yet. There I was. On my hands and knees, wrestling with dustbunnies bigger than Clooney under the fridge.
The dirt is here. I have seen the heretofore invisible enemy. And it scares me.
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