The Plan, Completed

Well, mostly completed. The cleaning part is done, anyway.

That's right--I am sitting in a clean house. The rubbermaid container overflowing with copies of trumpet excerpts has been repacked in alphabetical order and stowed in a closet. The bathroom sink and the kitchen table have been scraped, sanitized, and wiped down. The books have been straightened. All the mail has been answered. The bed has been made. If James and J were to walk in at this very instant, this house would be completely ready for habitation.

But it isn't, quite yet. I'm still catching little things that have been broken or a little out of order for so long that I can't see them unless I force myself to, like the screen in the kitchen window. It's been slightly out of it's track since the Spring, but I got so used to it that I didn't even notice it was wrong. I suspect that there are still some out-of-place screens in this house, but I'll have to really look to track them down.

What I'd really like to do, though, is borrow M's brain for about 24 hours. I wish that I could have the house really looking special for when they get back. If M was here she'd have transformed the bathroom with Chinese lanterns and streamers and possibly a trap bookcase. So far I've put out a sheet of Thomas the Train stickers for James, and that's been about it.

The past few days have actually been quite a revelation for me. I used to make almost no effort to keep my room tidy in college, which actually wasn't as bad as you'd think--I had about a week's worth of clothes, a sleeping bag, and nothing else except books. The worst that could happen would be that the books would get into the sleeping bag and the laundry. (This happened regularly.)

Then I became married to a woman, and all of a sudden there were fantastic luxuries like proper dishes in my life. This made my living quarters much more elegant, but also much more prone to degradation and mess. J, who was not particularly fastidious about keeping her college dorm clean either, did a good job of making sure that we kept up with our apartment, which was much too small to accommodate a Protestant wedding's worth of gifts. (Thank you to everyone, by the way. I appreciate eating my food off of real dishes and other lovely gifts.)

This is all to say that I have learned the immense value of keeping house. I have learned that how you present your home is part of how you present yourself in adult life, and that the state of your life is often reflected by the state of your living space...and that putting things back together or letting them fall apart is a whole life phenomenon.

With that said, it is also painfully obvious that a perfectly clean apartment without a wife or a two-year old lincoln-log-hurling, baseball-playing, tricycle-riding, mud-tracking, pillow-throwing menace is no home at all. It's an empty room that's only remotely interesting because of the possibility that they might come back.

So how do you say welcome back to your wife and your little monster? M, how would you do it? (I've actually already copied your Chinese lanterns idea.) If anyone has an idea text or message me...I'll just be waiting here in a clean house.