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When my husband and I had been married a few years, we spent nine months living in a house with carpeting in the kitchen. It was a very short pile carpet, granted, but absorbent nonetheless. At the time I had two small children—a four-year-old and a two-year-old. And anyone who has four-year-olds and two-year-olds knows that while kids that age are able to feed themselves, it usually isn’t without mess. Mess on the table. Mess on the clothes. Mess on the floor. Mess.
Meals became a source of doom for me. Not only was there the regular cleanup of dishes and utensils, there was usually a 15-to-20 minute ordeal to get the carpeted floor back to normal. Where a hard surface would permit simply sweeping or wiping up chunks of food and spills, carpeting required my picking up piece after piece—and crumb after crumb—by hand lest they be ground further in. And twice a day, it seemed, I was on my knees with a hot, soapy rag, wiping the carpet of some sticky spill.
Then one day, I came up with a perfect solution: I got a dog.
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I am outnumbered.
I am outnumbered when you look at the animal to adult ratio around our little New York City apartment, animal to bedroom ratio, animal to patience ratio.
Then if you throw the two girls along with the dog and the two cats and total up the number of ambulatory, mess-making creatures who do not yet clean up after themselves, the picture becomes clearer.
Fortunately, however, the children do not shed.
Yet.
The fact is, I had to go and fall in love with the kind of guy who would rather have a home full of pets than a home full of really pretty furniture with no claw marks on it. (Which, honestly, would have been my choice.) And so this past Christmas, I finally conceded and we rescued the pair of kitties. You know, for the kids. And for the dog. Who gets lonely. Or so I’m told.
Two years ago a local shelter magazine did a photo spread of our small downtown Detroit townhouse. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with these sorts of magazines, enjoying them for the inspiration they can provide, but also sort of loathing them for the projection of that impossible-to-attain image: the perfectly arranged, perfectly clean house. And then there we were, taunting anyone who would see the spread with that same lie.
For weeks leading up to the photo shoot, we ripped down the ugly wallpaper inherited from a previous occupant, repainted walls, rearranged tsotchkes, and went out and bought more fresh-cut flowers than we’d ever had in our house. In the days before the photographers’ arrival, we also cleaned like nobody’s business. Remember Tetris, how when you’d fit a row of boxes together perfectly, they’d disappear? If only that were true for all the boxes we crammed into our closets before the photo shoot. When we were done cleaning, the house looked great, but we couldn’t find anything we actually needed. Sure, the depression-era hobo-carved figurine looked great next to the Jonathan Adler vase, but where was the cell phone charger? It was nice to actually see what our dining room table looked like, but where could I put my laptop? Shelter magazines only show rooms. They do not show rooms as actually inhabited by human beings.
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