I stumble across the oddest ideas while I’m researching for something entirely different. In this case, I looked for more information about Ezra Jack Keats’s year in Paris by reading A Climate of Change, a travel account by his friend Jay Williams. In the midst of his travelogue, Jay throws in a bit of philosophy that got my attention.
“Show me a family that puts everything neatly away in inconspicuous cupboards built into the wall, and I will show you a family that is headed for extinction, closer to regimentation than to comfort.” He goes on to illustrate his point by claiming that he had once correctly predicted the failure of a marriage when he observed a wife who emptied the ashtray after each cigarette her husband stubbed out.
I recalled the years when I used to visit my kindergarteners before school started. Sometimes, I left with a feeling of uneasiness because of a too-clean house. I felt much better about children coming to my class from a home that had a general sense of healthy cleanliness broken up with a scattering of books and toys or an afghan from the couch in use to build a fort.
Maybe, I enjoyed Jay’s comment for another reason altogether. I need justification for the mess that lives in my house. My house is hygienic enough that it’s safe to eat here, but projects proliferate and are usually left out until they are finished. Think of the wasted time in putting them up and taking them out again, not to mention that if they are out, I can dabble with them when I have a couple of minutes between things.
A spotless house looks good in magazine pictures, but if you worry about Jay’s warning of what happens to those people in real life. I can assure you that if disasters are dependent on a too-neat house, it’s not happening here!