Messy

Here, here.

Family life is messy. Everything about it is messy. The clothes all over the floor. The spills. The early-morning unmade beds. The viruses that knock us out, one by one, for weeks on end. The arguments that escalate fast and go on too long.

I’m learning to appreciate—no, love—these scars that family life makes in the fabric of our lives. It’s this love that allows me to stop in an otherwise busy day and put the dishes down and grab old newspapers out of the trash and scatter them about to be our ocean, while Gregg decorates a stack of moving boxes to be ships. And now we are a band of pirates instead of an orderly group of people with folded laundry.

That’s Adrian, over at Communal Table.

Saucers

Dirty saucers

Dirty the China

My grandmother’s china was always dust-free. Her linen was crisp and white. Her silver had a high sheen. I have these objects of hers, and I love them. They are tucked into a corner cabinet with leaded glass, the focal point of our tiny dining room, rarely used.

But I am, unlike she, a fully servantless American (she didn’t work in a formal sense, and her servants were freelance: the weekly housemaid, the lawn company). My house is regularly less tidy than I want it to be. My kitchen floor, its own little ecosystem. After a dinner party, I leave the china until the next morning.

I try to keep one foot in both world: hers and ours. Hers: Beautiful household objects that require tender care, and bestow upon their owners a sense of order and perfectibility. A deliberate effort to forget everything about the poverty of her youth. Ours: The ubiquity of two-income households, digital distraction. The deliberate effort to relearn much of what she tried to forget (how to shell a bean, how to pickle a tomato, how to do more with less). Hers: Gracefulness, elegance. Ours: Comfort, simplicity. Hers: Perfectibility. Ours: Oh, well.