Living in a Museum
After roughly a year of trying to sell my property, I’ve taken it off the market. But it’s not because I’ve decided to remain in my home—my acreage is too much work for one old woman. And other elderly people have assured me it ain’t gonna get any easier. Staying long term (well, however long I have left) is not an option. I will put my place back on the market at some point.
But I have essentially been living in a museum for the last year. I must continually ensure everything is clean and in its place. The house must look as if nobody lives here. You know, no signs of life, like shoes in front of the couch. Or the morning’s coffee cup on the nightstand. Or toothpaste splatters on the mirror.
And if somebody is coming to tour the house, my dog and I have to leave for a couple of hours. Which is okay if it’s 70 degrees and the sun is shining. But figuring out what to do for a couple of hours in lousy weather is not my favorite. Neither Tootsie nor I particularly like to walk in the rain or cold. And Tootsie generally isn’t welcome at indoor restaurants.
And all my “valuables” must be hidden away. I don’t own much that is particularly valuable, but you’d be surprised at what might disappear if not secured.
After one viewing, Tootsie and I came home at dusk, hungry. While preparing dinner, I discovered somebody had stolen a pomegranate from the fruit bowl on my sideboard. I might not have even noticed except that the perpetrator had taken a red bell pepper from the vegetable bowl (I store beautiful produce where I can see it) and put it in the fruit bowl to disguise the hole the theft had created. That was the thief’s mistake. If the pomegranate had merely been missing, I might have presumed that I’d forgotten I already ate it. But I would never put a pepper in the fruit bowl!
The theft wouldn’t break me financially, but it did something to my spirit—and my faith in human beings.
To be fair, living in the museum has taught me some good habits. I am much better at washing my dinner dishes before I go to bed. I vacuum more often. And I have cleared the clutter to the point where Marie Kondo, the minimalist guru, would probably give me a gold star.
And I’ve discovered that I like living in the resultant clearing. So much so that I seem to have caught the minimalist disease—I can’t quit discarding things. The house continually gets emptier. (Maybe this is to thwart the thieves? To minimize the cost of moving?)
Well, I’m going to live like a normal person for some months. I might leave the dishes until tomorrow—or even next week. My shoes will remain wherever I’ve kicked them off. I might not make my bed at all. (Well, maybe just on clean sheet night.) I will not panic if a tumbleweed of dog hair drifts across the living room floor.
I could do a jigsaw puzzle—and leave it all over the dining table. I know. You’re thinking that I could have done this all along. Surely home seekers would not adversely judge the quality of the house because puzzle pieces were neatly sorted by color on the table. But I implore you to consider how you’d feel if, when your puzzle was all but complete, you discovered a piece was missing.