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SEE JANE READ

January 25

Why clean when you can read? With Jane Julius Honchell

For as long as I can remember, the number one entry on my list of New Year’s resolutions has been “Be Neater!” Not that this vow’s place of prominence has ever caused me to do anything about it. I am, admittedly, an indifferent housekeeper because I have always had a love/hate relationship with cleaning. The hate part usually wins, and I’ll jump at any excuse to delay yet another unsatisfactory encounter with my vacuum cleaner. Luckily, this year I found a great reason to procrastinate, just in time to save myself from taking on Mission Impossible: the semi-annual rake-out of my bedroom.

My excuse came in the form of a delightful and thought-provoking anthology of essays edited by Mindy Lewis, titled “Dirt: The Quirks, Habits, and Passions of Keeping House.” I love this book for several reasons. First, it was reassuring to learn that I’m not alone in my ambivalence toward housework. Second, the 38 essays are almost all very well-written. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, they provide surprising insights into the complexity of our relationship with clutter and our ability or inability to master it.

Cleaning, it turns out, has both positive and negative aspects. On the plus side, housekeeping provides some people with a sense of purpose, a reason for being, even. Several of the writers hark back to the days when housekeeping was considered a woman’s job – just as it was her husband’s job to bring home the bacon. They write about their mothers’ pride in glistening windows, the glow of perfectly-waxed floors, the crispness of freshly-ironed sheets. For other essayists, bringing order to the chaos of their closets gives them a sense of control over an otherwise unmanageable universe. Still others find cleaning a deeply comforting act, or even, as Laura Shine Cunningham reports in her essay, “Waxing Poetic,” a sensual, nearly erotic pleasure.

As one whose closets could provide an archaeologist with a lifetime worth of digging and sifting for artifacts, I connected deeply with the writers who talk about how the clutter we accumulate defines us, becomes our history, and provides us with a sense of who we are. For them, mess takes on an archival quality, and cleaning becomes a journey of self-discovery. As Louise Rafkin, who was a professional house cleaner before she became a journalist, says, “The story is in the home,” and in the objects she noticed in other people’s houses, she found clues about the owners’ relationships and emotional states.

Okay, so much for the good motives for cleaning up your mess. But what about the Darth Vader aspect of dirt – the dark side? Many writers honed in on housekeeping (or the lack of it) as a source of friction between spouses, significant others and, of course, mothers and daughters or step-daughters. “I Don’t Know What to Do with You,” by Lisa Selin Davis, and “The Beauty of Help,” by Kyoko Mori, center on cleaning conflicts between them and their respective step-mothers. Davis admits that her deliberate slovenliness as a teenager was an act of rebellion against a step-mother who wanted her to be part of the new family. Mori’s essay is far more touching. In it, she paints portraits of her sad mother, who filled their home with beauty before committing suicide. The dead mother was replaced, with unseemly haste, by a step-mother Mori describes as “a witch who believed herself to be Cinderella.” Speaking of rebellion, a number of the female contributors to “Dirt” address the reasons many modern women refuse to clean: that fact that their mothers and fathers saw housekeeping as women’s work, or as a mark of true womanhood, and the idea that mess is a sign of a woman’s independence. In “Dirty Nostalgia,” Alissa Quart talks about “the moral superiority of chaos.”

Another subject that dominates the dark side of dirt is the compulsive cleaner. In “Country Living,” retired librarian Brian Gerber writes about his partner’s obsession with the machinery of cleaning – indoors and out. While Gerber would rather sit on his porch and talk or read, his partner revels in weed whacking, to the point where “he once trimmed the roadside weeds in front of a forest.” Apparently, any cleaning device that makes noise is music to the partner’s ears, and he is known to vacuum late into the night. While Gerber’s partner may not have reached the Obsessive/Compulsive stage, in “Family Heirloom,” Rebecca Walker realizes that she has carried her mother’s criteria for neatness to extremes when she can’t stand the fact that her young son is playing with his Legos on the floor. When her husband lets her know that her urge to control their environment is irrational, she begins to look for the roots of her “…compulsion to adhere to my mother’s rules for proper living,” and she comes to an amazing realization:

“Somewhere along the way, I had started connecting the orderliness of my home with survival. I truly believed that if my living space wasn’t perfectly tidy, everything – not just my house but my life – would fall apart.”

On the lighter side of the dark side is a pet peeve about cleaning that many people, including me, share: it never ends. Just as soon as you do in the dust bunnies or capture the cobwebs, they reappear. In her wonderful essay, “The House We Keep, the Home We Make,” Rebecca McClanahan remembers an artist friend lamenting, “Painting stays done; housekeeping doesn’t.” Nevertheless, McClanahan makes a good case for the joys of keeping house and its importance, despite the fact that we’ll just have to do it all over again tomorrow…or someday. As she says, “Every morning, every evening, the mess awaits us. The messy, hungry, beautiful world, wanting and needing our touch,”

I have to say that, much as I dislike cleaning, I do love home-making, and this book has made me realize that the two are eternally entwined. “Dirt” is a rich, fulfilling book, and one I would normally take the time to urge you to read, except for the fact that I have to go now. I have a date with Mr. Clean.

Jane Julius Honchell, who resides in Glenburn Twp., is a features writer and columnist and an associate professor at Keystone College, La Plume, where she serves as Director of Theater. "See Jane Read" appears monthly in The Abington Journal.

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