My Lovely Dwelling Place

  On my day planner I have a standard entry entitled “general house”. This stands for making my bed, picking up and putting away assorted items left lying around, managing any laundry, cleaning the kitchen, making sure the floors aren’t littered with debris and dog hair and collecting garbage. This morning while performing these mundane tasks I was grumbling – “Why does no one else pick up?”; “How does the floor get this dirty?”; “You’d think with all the cooking others do they could wash a dish!”; “What happened to all the towels?!”; That’s the problem with mundane tasks – your mind can think on other things while you do them. On a positive note, my three adult sons, who still live here, all make their beds – that’s success, right? I must have got that message across. I’m a firm believer in making the bed – I heard it said once if your bed is made your room is 80% clean and you have accomplished something early in the day to set the tone for the rest of it. This is a similar th...

  The ironies of living with adult children are manifold. For example, asking where they are going or where they have been gets a response similar to espionage of state secrets. However, if I have left without their notice or permission – it requires multiple texts and calls and inquiries from whomever as to my whereabouts. I don’t presume this urgent desire to know my whereabouts springs from a tender concern for my welfare. I believe it comes, more likely, from annoyance that I am not where they left me.   As far as duties required when living in a home such as scrubbing a toilet or a bathtub, those are miraculously cleaned by the housekeeping fairy. When it comes to sweeping a floor or vacuuming a rug, it is much easier to leave footprints than to remove them. Simple requests are met with sighs of disgust and an obvious attitude of imposition – after all there are agendas that must be kept – theirs not mine. What about the dishes you ask, well making them dirty is muc...