How we really live

I have mentioned before our reluctance to invite people to our home because of the necessity of making sure their shots are up to date. Our stuff, being far out of proportion to the size of the house, is in a constant state of disarray, which means that the house is potentially hazardous to anyone who is unfamiliar with negotiating it.

Even a five minutes' visit from someone necessitates a frenzy of stuffing things into closets, behind curtains, in the dryer, etc. (I read once that the dryer is a good place to store things in a pinch, but I actually had one guest, who must have read the same thing and wanted to see if I had, open the dryer when he came over for the first time. Fortunately I had not followed the advice.)

Should anyone venture to look into these areas where we temporarily stash things, we would be required, by the Rules for Handling Sneaky Guests, to shoot them. Therefore we take great care in making sure they do not venture into them. It would just add to the mess.

Although we have made great strides in whittling down our "stuff" -- mainly by shifting it to our booth in an antique mall so other people can buy it and clutter up their houses -- there is a core group of boxes containing items that have no permanent home as of yet. They shuffle, like refugees, from one part of the basement to another. A few weeks ago they shuffled to the laundry room in anticipation of a friend's visit. Over the weekend they stayed there, as, on principle, I do not do laundry on weekends. Or I may have just been too lazy to put them back, I forget which.

Monday morning, I was to regret this. At 6:30 a man from the gas company unexpectedly appeared at our door, requesting to look at our gas meter. This is located, as you may have guessed, in our laundry room.

"Sure!" I said, standing in my pink polka-dot pajamas, barely awake. "When was your last tetanus shot?"

No, I did not really say that. And the Rules for Handling Sneaky Guests do not apply to service personnel, so I couldn't shoot him. I had no choice but to lead him down to the basement. He climbed over the mountain of boxes, bags, and miscellaneous junk as I hovered over him, wishing I could make both the mess and my polka-dot pajamas instantly disappear. I'm sure he had plenty to talk about at the dinner table that night, such as his wish that he had gone to law school so he could work in a nice, plush office instead of people's deplorable basements.

All of this is pretty humiliating. But I regained some of my dignity while reading a "Cathy" comic strip recently. Cathy was frantically trying to clean her house before her family's arrival for Thanksgiving, and she told her husband that all the mess wasn't really how she lived. The husband, evidently not married long enough to know not to touch that subject, insisted that it was how she lived -- the house looked like that all the time. Cathy drew herself up to her full height (which, in the newspaper, is about 1.8 centimeters) and declared, "This is only how I'm living until I have time to live the way I really live!"

To which I can only say, Amen.