“Did you see their chairs?” I asked my husband as we walked out of a not-to-be-named relative’s house.
It was our first time ever visiting them in their home, and while the house was completely spotless and impeccably decorated, it had little in the way of any personal effects that would tie it back to its owners.
There were no family photos, not so much as one magnet on the fridge, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a footprint on the carpet amid the perfectly equidistant vacuum lines.
But what really struck me about the house were the chairs.
They had a set of five high-backed chairs in the kitchen, each one pushed in at a perfect 45-degree angle to the counter. It felt sterile. Hotel-like, even. And as I walked out with my husband, I remember thinking, “Who on earth has the time to keep things that much in order?”
So when I asked him if he saw the chairs, what I really meant fell somewhere in between, “How is that level of house-wide cleanliness even possible for an unannounced visit?!” and “Are we sure they actually live there? Like…full time?”
And then I saw it. A twinkle in his eye. His soul so full of hope that we, too, could one day be the house with the 45-degree chair people with vacuum lines in the carpet, that he barely managed to muster a “Wasn’t it GREAT?!?” before falling back into a captivating daydream about the prospect of cleanliness in our much more lived-in, and much more cluttered home.
Long before this conversation, I knew that “clean” held two very different meanings for each of us. If the military didn’t drill his definition into him, his childhood did. He and his sibling followed a rigorous chore chart, doing things around the house on a regular basis, things that I can’t even seem to fit into an entire calendar year. No detail was too small, no dust bunny too elusive.
Me on the other hand? I’m a right-brained recovering pack-rat, which tells you just about all you need to know about my state of cleanliness. I have little mementos of my adventures everywhere, and my method of “clean” can best be described as somewhere between “organized clutter” and “there was a struggle.” While I can happily acknowledge my methods could use a little work, I also know that I will never be a house with 45-degree chairs person. It’s just not in my DNA.
With a bit of disappointment in his voice, my husband was the one to break the ensuing silence, “Let me guess, you don’t like it?”.
Now I didn’t want to be the one to dash his aspirations of having a home so clean we could host surgical procedures, but I also knew, for me, it just wasn’t realistic. I thought very carefully about my answer, and came up with, “that’s not it. It actually made me sad.”
“Sad?“, he asked, once we were back in our car, and backing out of the driveway.
“Yes, sad,” I said. “It felt empty. Lonely even. It was a lot like a hotel.”
“Which is perfect,” he answered.
“Yes, but…no one stays in a hotel. People come and they go. No one lives there,” I said. “There’s nothing to make the space your own. Your particular room is identical to 100 other rooms. There’s nothing to set it apart, nothing to make it unique — nothing to make it yours. A house, your home.”
“When you come to our home,” I continued, “the first thing you’ll see is a welcome sign hanging from the door that I made. Sit on our couch, and you can snuggle up with the blanket we bought as we road-tripped through Ireland. We’ve got artwork from our nieces and nephews up on the fridge, pictures of us, our families, and friends, scattered all throughout our house. Even our dog surrounds himself with his most treasured possessions, including the now threadbare stuffed dolphin he was sent home with 11 years ago when I rescued him. Our home is a reflection of us; our lives, our love, our kids, our everything, and face it…all that can be a little messy.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be,” he answered.
“Sure, but where’s the fun in that?” I said. “I’ll take a million grubby little handprints on our fridge and a pile of pint-sized shoes at the door because that means we’re blessed with the tiny humans it takes to make those messes. I’ll gladly marvel at the extensiveness of Riley’s nose art on all of our windows because it means we’re fortunate enough to know the true companionship of a dog. And I’ll settle for chairs that aren’t at a perfect 45-degree angle, with the hopes that we were having such a good time with the people filling them, that no one was concerned with twisting them back into the perfect position. So yes, it makes me sad to imagine how lonely that must be, to spend all of your time cleaning and none of it living.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
We spent the rest of the car ride in mutual silence, not out of anger, but in reflection. And when we opened the doors to our own house, with dust bunnies dancing in the corners, and children’s toys piled high, we smiled, knowing our chairs may not ever be perfectly straight, but our priorities most certainly were.
