Minding the Mess

Summer is a perfect time to be (productively) lazy

Endust was a friend of mine. The can accompanied my siblings and me every Saturday when we helped (read: “were coerced”) to clean the house. The trick is to spray the substance on the rags cut from my father’s old white tee-shirts. It wasn’t really a trick. More a mandate from my mother, otherwise, one might spray polish unintentionally on flooring, carpets or drapes. Or each other.

Messes didn’t last long in our household. My mother, a daughter of Italian immigrants who was raised during the Depression, carried that tendency well into her dementia in her ninth decade of life. In her care home, she was often heard complaining, sometimes swearing, about games, books, kitchen items appearing ready to tumble from shelves, counters, or tables. Weekly, I straightened her room and closet and drawers to at least halt one round of complaints.

In our twenties, my older sister, Laura, and I often couch-surfed at each other’s apartments or condos or homes. Inevitably, Laura left something behind, an earring, something spilled, even a shoe. Singular. I called it the Laura Trail.

It seems our family has a history of messes, despite my mother attempts to mold us otherwise. And despite my nature to mimic my mother’s, I’m learning to how to be messy too.

Last week, after our grand littles visited, the notion of messes snuck up on me again. I’m not a mess person. The house is fairly picked up. But with a 2 1/2 year-old and 3 month-old around, plus parents all staying with us in three-story, Italianate-style townhome that involved many flights up and down for forgotten items, the bramble of toys, shoes, and socks laying around the kitchen somehow escaped my notice.

Yellow and red playdough left pressed into “cherry pie.” A pink plastic telephone which Nora pretended to set its timer for the pie, left wide open in the days of plastic flip phones. White rippled burp clothes, cocktail paper napkins containing sunflowers, or Celebrate, or turkeys, and red paper plates scattered around after Nora discovered as one of the few drawers she could reach and open. Matchbox cars that once belonged to my son run across rugs and wooden floors. Magnatiles (every grandparent needs to run out and buy these amazing toys), similar to our obsession with Lincoln Logs, Legos, and Tinkertoys, strewn about in various stages of unbuilt forms in testimony to any toddler’s ability to become an architect someday.

A coterie of coats, hats, boots, shoes, socks, sandals enjoying their own party in our back room and pantry closet. And messes that extended to donut and ice cream time, which technically fall more under the category of expected grandparenting.

It took an entire week for Mark and I to complete the laundry after their stay. They didn’t generate much in the way of used linens or towels, but we were kind of lazy in picking up all the messes. If we returned everything to its place, would we wipe away their presence too?

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The house is now picked up, floors mopped. But the week hit me with a viral infection, and a looming root canal for a dental procedure gone awry. This has created its own mess in my head.

If I’m not cleaning, I should be writing. If I’m not writing, I should be cleaning. However, I’ve not been productive in either of those categories.

I seem to be hanging on to the concept of mess. Uncaring about a pair of robins currently enjoying the last berries stripped off the sour cherry tree in the community garden behind our home and leaving their deposits on my terrace. I'm making friends with them despite their mess.

As I settle into summer and laze away in whatever messes I’d like to create with my writing, I’ll to sort out any messes that originate in the words too, reminding me of my writing group that meets on Wednesdays where I’ll usually hear a writer—or myself—say about a fastwrite, "This is a mess, but I'll read it anyhow." It never is, and as such, is a reminder what we view as mess others view with astonishment.

Françoise Sagan, a playwright and author of Bonjour Tristesse, a novel composed when she was a teen, once said, “It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying “I’ve done this or that.” You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.”

While I’ve mostly written about messes, the concept of laziness goes hand in hand. We might consider people with messy environs or appearances lazy. Or vice versa. It’s not true. Not everyone can be like my mother who contained the chaos in order to maintain a certain level of bella figura (making a good impression). Did it work? I’m sorry she’s no longer around to give her assessment, though I know what her answer would be.

I like the idea of every minute is complete in itself. In the time period which any mess is made, it truly is a complete moment. This is what we learn from our grand littles messes, big and small.

Readying for summer, I am coming out of my illness, out of a fog where the mind’s eye macheted its way through the white mass of the mind’s thoughts. Synapses are firing again. Neural connections being made. Funny how an illness, along with germs and bacteria, also carries with it some wisdom. A proverbial cleaning of the cognitive cobwebs is happening, ideas generating themselves, and writing being written once more.

The house—and me—are ready for the next round of mess.

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What kind of mess are you in these days? Leave a comment below.

After several months of caregiver writing experiences and poetry readings, little is left on the calendar for now.

Something Italian: From Distant Shores to Family Tables, the Recipes That Held Us Together is now in the hands of the book designer. She’s Italian, based in the UK. I’m excited to hand this off for someone else’s viewpoint of the work. The down time gave me the opportunity to consider some fresh ideas on a launch and marketing. If you’re not already a subscriber, you’ll want to be for this one!

Edible Ohio Valley published my work about tomatoes. Of course I would write about tomatoes. Buy yourself a subscription today or find a distribution location online. Coming soon: Lavender and gelato. And possibly lavender gelato!

August 12 – Caring for the Caregiver writing experience. Giving Voice Foundation with Pauletta Hansel and Annette Januzzi Wick. Virtual. Free. Continues with three other sessions. Sign up here.

November 14 – Caring for the Caregiver writing experience. Giving Voice Foundation with Pauletta Hansel and Annette Januzzi Wick. In-person. Free. Continues with three other sessions. Sign up here.