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February 20, 2007

Dirty little secrets

counter space is a terrible thing to waste

WARNING: If you are the type who dusts on top of the refrigerator every week and/or you can’t sleep at night unless you’re sure the dryer’s lint trap is freshly cleaned, you may want to skip today’s blog entry. Martha Stewart, this means you.

I have a sordid confession to make. Literally.

Our house has three distinct levels of clean. First, we have the foyer, dining room, guest bathroom and the ironically named “living” room, which are always kept spotless just in case someone drops by or, you know, the Windex corporation decides to use our home to film their next commercial. (Which they would never do, thanks to my slavish devotion to vinegar, but that is another post for another day.) The dogs are not allowed in these rooms. Hell, Mr. Tall and I are basically not allowed in these rooms. And that is how they stay clean. The goal is to fool our friends and neighbors into believing that we are not savages living in squalor.

Then we have the kitchen, family room, and the offices. I hesitate to the use the term “squalor” here—I prefer “comfortably cluttered.” We have vast expanses of counter space, which I was ecstatic about when we bought the house, but it turns out that lots of counter space = plenty of room to dump whatever you may be carrying while telling yourself that you’ll tidy up in a minute. Hence, the tangle of dog leashes, pile of books, and tower of junk mail.

Okay, now we get to the real squalor, aka our spare room and (shamefully) the bedroom closet. In our defense, I grew up with basements, but these are in short supply in the great state of Arizona. So the spare room serves as our surrogate basement, which means that old boxes of VHS tapes, clothes designated for Goodwill and everything we (shamefully) never bothered to unpack from the last move are moldering away in there. As for the bedroom closet…well, let’s just say it would behoove me to invest in some extra laundry baskets and a few shoe racks.

So there it is! Sob! The messy truth about my life. I pretend I’m clean and semi-organized, but I’m living a lie! And my only defense is a platitude taken from a cross-stitched sampler hanging in my friend Barbara’s powder room: “A spotless house is the sign of a misspent life.”

Yeah, I know. Tell it to Martha.

This blog has been brought to you by Margo Candela’s Underneath It All, a novel about finding out who you really are and then trying to forget what you discovered.

Posted by Beth at 10:49 PM | Comments (4)

Comments

Posted by: wendy at February 21, 2007 3:49 PM

Posted by: Alesia Holliday at February 21, 2007 9:50 PM

Posted by: The LC Eileen at February 22, 2007 1:07 PM

Posted by: Sheri at February 24, 2007 2:17 AM