A Clean House
For company, mostly.
Everyone gets ready for company, as we call it. If you are having a party on Friday night you end up spending Thursday evening cleaning. It goes late - too late - into the night. You, a husband, wonder how long this is going to go on. And you, a wife, wonder why your husband is unable to understand a proper level of cleanliness. For man, “clean” means one thing. For woman, it means quite another thing.
If you are having family over on Sunday afternoon, the morning is filled with checklists, kids in trouble, and most likely a few fights that are smoothed over just enough to have a pleasant evening by the time said company arrives.
Most of the stuff that hangs out in the living room all week gets shoved in an already too full closet or a bedroom. The real blankets are shoved in the laundry and a decorative blanket that doesn’t feel good but does look good makes an appearance on the couch. The bathrooms are cleaner than they have ever been, the counters in the kitchen are completely barren, for some reason there is a candle lit in the bathroom, and the house smells vaguely like vanilla or an overpriced shop for tourists in northern Vermont.
Our houses are the cleanest they will ever be when we aren’t actually doing any relaxing in them.
It’s because we don’t want people to see how we actually live. We want people to see how we wish we lived. It’s no different than taking a shower in the morning, ironing our clothes after that, and not blurting out everything that flits through our minds when we lie and say, “Good,” when someone asks how we are doing on a Tuesday morning when we are not doing very good at all.
