Three shades of clean
I have recently concluded that there are three basic types of people: Those who can’t stand mess, those who can stand their own mess but not anybody else’s, and those who don’t mind mess at all. (The third category can be subdivided into those who see mess and don’t care, and those who aren’t even aware there is mess.)
I don’t know too many people in the first category. I once had a friend who, when dining at my home, would rise from her chair near the end of the meal and hover over a person’s shoulder while they ate their last bite of food. She was waiting to take the plate to the kitchen sink.
“You’re company,” I’d encourage. “Sit down! Relax!” But she was temperamentally unable to relax until the dishes were done. And if that meant doing them herself, so be it. Needless to say, her house was always spotless. She swept, routinely, in places that nobody could ever possibly see, because she just knew dirt was lurking there.
When my husband and I were raising children, we were constantly calculating extrinsic reinforcers for their performance of chores, trying to get the three kids to help keep our home clean. We couldn’t tolerate the mess of five people metastasizing throughout the house. (The mess for people in category two can generally be measured with a formula: Number of people squared. So, our family’s mess was five squared. Or 25. My mess alone is 1. My mess alone with my sweetie was four. A lot more than 1, but significantly less than 25.)
After the kids had grown and moved out, my husband seemed able to tolerate mess better than before. And better than I. I dusted and mopped and continually reorganized things hoping to find the way to keep mess at bay. Over time, my beloved evolved (devolved? I hesitate to imply a value judgment) into the third category, and became the sort of person who didn’t mind mess. Maybe didn’t even see mess.
But now that my darling has passed on and I live alone for the first time in 35 years, I tolerate mess more easily. Because it’s my mess. I understand it. I know how far I can let it go before it will make me anxious. There’s no pressure from anybody else to either clean or disregard the mess. This is the upside of losing a spouse. Not a fair trade, mind you, but one looks for solace wherever it can be found.
Now, should I find myself morphing into the third category, folks might conclude that I am suffering. Mess can be a sign of depression.
But even if depression is ruled out, people in category three can be seen as too lazy to take an interest in tidying up. Yet I have known some very industrious people who live in apparent chaos. Perhaps the advent of category three in my life would simply mean I’ll finally do something noteworthy. So that a eulogy at my funeral might contain something more than “She kept a clean home.”
Early in my tenure as an Arkansan, I routinely crossed paths with a wise Ozark woman who imparted some fine wisdom on housekeeping: “I am not here to serve my house. My house is here to serve me.”
My house and I are still having that argument.