The Latest Dirt

My mother told me yesterday that my grandfather Will, who apparently was a font of wisdom, used to say, "Company is good for a house."  What he meant by that was that when we expect company, we spend a great amount of time picking up and cleaning in the pretense that our homes always look that good.  Everyone buys into this myth because everyone is guilty of perpetrating it.

Yesterday, just because I could no longer stand to look at the crumbs under the kitchen table or the dust bunnies that skittered across my laminate floors, I cleaned my house to within an inch of its and my life.  Or I should say that I cleaned the den from top to bottom (so that we do not die of dust inhalation the first time I turn on the ceiling fan), and I did the same for the master bedroom.  The other rooms got a good sweeping and mopping in the hopes that we will survive with the rest until I finish packing what is stacked in the living room.  Those goods, of course, are staged to go into the U-Haul next week, destined for Florida.

Modern man is the one who screwed up this whole notion of clean.  God had the right idea.  He put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with good, rich dirt underneath their feet.  No need to sweep, and no need to pull out the trusty wet mop.  When something got too dirty, God sent the rain to hose it down.  No scrubbing necessary on Eve's part.  Food grew from the Earth (the original vegan diet), and fruit was plentiful on the trees.  What waste there was from what was consumed just got discarded in the bushes where it rotted and nourished the soil. Even human waste was deposited somewhere in the bushes to act as fertilizer.  Eve never laid hand on a toilet brush  or a can of Lysol.  No wonder they refer to the Garden as paradise.

Now that we messed everything up, we have this notion of having to make things clean.  I have been cleaning a house since I was a child back in the late fifties, and guess what -- the dirt just keeps coming back!  We drag it on on our feet, haul it in on our clothes, slough it off when we sleep, and generally make a mess of things each waking moment.  Adam and Eve did the same thing, but no one cared because it was all a part of nature.  Maybe if there had been more people around back then, Eve would have felt the need to trim the bushes for company, but I doubt that anyone would have noticed. 

I have to stop being so paranoid about dirt and trying to keep things picked up and clean. I am in the process of moving half og my household from storage in the basement to staging in the living room and garage.  Neither environment is spotlessly clean.  Dirt happens. And after all, if dirt was good enough for God, who am I to argue?