The Unapologetic Messiness of Animals

I lived in the same house through my whole childhood. It was small by conventional standards, more of a starter home, and so over the years we used every inch of it. In spite of this, it was also incredibly clean, free of clutter, dust, and dirty dishes. A clean home was the cake my parents wanted to have and eat too, which only works if one is constantly making cakes, which is basically what my parents did. Every day we would unleash chaos and every evening order would be restored. My dad waged a similarly endless war in the backyard, constantly pruning, planting, weeding, skimming, and blowing. The curb in front of our house was always piled with yard waste, evidence of all the life that was let loose and then brought under control.

I thought about all this when I was house-sitting in Manilla. I was in-between jobs, relationships, and houses, and so I found myself living out on this glorified sandbar for a few months taking care of a dog, a cat, and a handful of orchids. The house and its history were much older than me. At one point children were born and raised here. Then for a while it was just a couple of empty nesters, then a widower, and then me. Evidence of the chaos of life existed all through this place. From my perspective, it was out of balance and I sought to gain control. I reorganized the kitchen to my liking, cleaned cabinets and walls and floors, stuffed a guest room full of clutter and shut the door.

I was used to living with another person. I was used to the messes we made and cleaned up and then made again. However, I was not used to the unapologetic messiness of animals. Every day, Daisy and Raven went out into the world and then brought as much as they could back with them. There was hair everywhere, food and water spilled and tracked across the floor, and sand, pounds and pounds of sand. Sweeping became a daily ritual, which at first I enjoyed, making these endless piles of sand much like my dad with his endless piles of yard waste. It was a meditation. However, it was not effective in any literal sense at maintaining cleanliness. I would usually let the animals out when I swept so that they wouldn’t make a mess of my piles. Then I would let them back in with their latest bounty, which they would promptly distribute onto the floors, restoring them to their natural state. Eventually I gave up the ritual.

Lately I’ve been wondering about my priorities. I am a fair weather writer, putting pen to paper when the right combination of time, inspiration, motivation and creativity come together. You could really say that about anything I do because I am mostly without discipline or devotion. But I do work hard to keep a clean home, and with few exceptions I have done this consistently since moving out of my parents place 8 years ago. At times it feels ridiculous. I read part of a book in high school in which the main character rejoiced in his ability to keep a perfectly clean home after his wife left him. With now total control he had devised and implemented an efficient method for having fresh sheets on the bed every night, and he celebrated his ingenuity as if fresh sheets were better than a partner to share them with. It was a random old book in the back of my senior English class that I read for 20 minutes, but it really stuck with me. Am I like this guy? Do I endlessly sweep floors wishing that all the comings and goings, the sandy bodies, the friends who forget to take off their shoes, the wayward food morsels, the messes and the people who make them, wishing that they would all cease to exist, so that I could enjoy my perfectly clean floors and all their emptiness in solitude, until the point at which I cease to exist, a point of little significance to the living who have already been pushed out of this sterile, closed off shell of a home? If not that extreme, do I at least prioritize stability and control in my life at the expense of other more important qualities and pursuits?

I fret about this all the time now that I am no longer a student. I can decide to live anywhere or do anything with my time, constrained of course by the ever pressing need for money, which itself is also relatively new to me. Under the pressure, all my fair weather habits have fallen away, and so I unhappily work what feels like too many hours and struggle to put the rest of my time and energy to good use. I clean my home, then wonder at the cost of it all, the nice furniture, the good neighborhood, which I can only enjoy on nights and weekends except of course when I’m cleaning. There is a fine line between being perpetually dissatisfied, which I wear as a badge of honor, and being a downright complainer. On one side is a person trying to make their world better, on the other side is a person throwing their world in the trash. In the spirt of working with what I’ve got, maybe I’ll embrace stability and control as a means of building stronger habits. Maybe I’ll embrace my one devotion in life, the steadfast keeping of a clean home, as a standing invitation to get it real messy.

Originally published at ersorensen.com on August 14, 2018.