It's a Dirty Life

Today was cleaning/organization day in the Bronx. J. came home last night with a truck-full of Ikea storage units. The piles of clutter had gotten out of hand, to the point where the pile-areas were beginning to outnumber the actual functional areas (bed, table, couch), and the place was beginning to resemble the sorting warehouse for a Salvation Army Thrift Store. It was one of those days where once you get started, you just keep going: we washed windows, scrubbed countertops, wiped down bookshelves, rearranged the contents of cabinets, vacuumed...

It's funny, this sudden dose of Northern European orderliness, especially on the heels of my suburban excursion. I wouldn't say that I am a particularly clean person, or adept at housekeeping - I am not one of those a-place-for-everything type of people (and have been known to grow hot with envy when I enter the abode, work space, or automobile, of someone who is - how do they do it?). But as a result of my suburban upbringing, a certain immaculate newness is more familiar to me than not - new homes, brightly-lit supermarkets with strictly-organized aisles of perfect produce, clean streets and well-manicured lawns, shiny new cars. The suburban life is rooted in this culture of well-maintainedness, and people spend their time and money to uphold it; it's second nature, and a kind of communal contract.

City life and country life, on the other hand, are both pretty dirty. In the Bronx especially, but also in Manhattan and Brooklyn where I've lived in the past, visitors from other places notice it immediately: the air is dirty, your hands are always dirty (the other reason I feel bad about my hands: I probably wash them four or five times/day), the subway stations, the streets, your apartment windowsill and pretty much every exposed surface. At some point, you relent, you accept the dirt, your relationship with it becomes more about health than appearance, i.e. you clean because you don't want to get sick, not because you want your wine glasses to sparkle.

In the country of course, dirt is where you are. We're in red shale land where I am, and the dust is everywhere. In warmer weather, you're in and out of the house constantly, tending to the yard or walking the dog, so dirt tracks in and out with you (I have become a dirt-under-your-fingernails kind of gal, and I've just sort of given in). And of course, there are the spiderwebs and insect carcasses. My pup came down out of the woods once with a deer hoof in his jaws.

Wow, you should see the place: we are orderly, we rock! The clutter is out of sight, things are folded and placed neatly on shelves. We can see the surface of the dining table! Who knew it was such nice wood. It's like something out of Real Simple, a before and after story.

Speaking of which, a friend of mine bought me a gift subscription last year. It's regular bathroom reading in the country (J. even reads it, cover to cover). I'd say it's one of those guilty pleasures, but in fact it's more like a guilty torture: it occurred to me one day that all those "helpful hints" and "problem solvers" are really more like reminders of things that I guess I am supposed to be worried about but that I would never think of in the first place. Oh my God, is that how you get stains out of the sink? Oh my God, am I supposed to be getting all the stains out of my sink?

Cleaning has always felt to me like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill. The minute you clean it, it's dirty again. Life is always unraveling, and we're always working to reorder it. Dirt accrues. Entropy. Glorious nature. I try to remember that dust is really my own skin. But cleaning is also in nature, I guess - cats, birds, etc. I wonder what the "standard" for cleanliness really should be, if there is a should? What would the cats and the birds tell us if they could? I sometimes think we should just do the best we can do with a broom, a dustpan, a rag, and a bucket of sudsy water - and leave it at that. If it's good enough for the farm wife or the pioneer woman, it's good enough for me (dysentery and cholera notwithstanding).

In the end, it's really about vantage point, isn't it? Up close vs. far away? From where I'm sitting, this place looks pretty clean; but if I get up into the nooks and crevices with my magnifying glass...

I am reminded now of a particularly affecting story of Mary Gordon's called "City Life," about a woman living in filth in her NYC apartment, a kind of exploration of the existential state of dirty-ness. Well worth the read.