When my mother-in-law was a bride in 1968, she discovered that one of her new responsibilities was to iron my father-in-law’s army uniform. First she dipped the freshly-washed pants and shirt in a solution of water and starch. Not a can of Niagara, but the powdered kind in a box. She’d squeeze it, then roll the uniform in towels and chill it in the refrigerator for hours before she ever even got the ironing board.
Think of the reactions of people today to such a household chore. Aside from the ubiquitous plaint about, Why couldn’t my father-in-law iron his own uniform, the most common comment would be, “Can you imagine spending all that time ironing?”
Housework, it seems has become something for somebody else to do, or not to do at all. A popular Washington Post writer recently devoted a whole column to the question, “Doesn’t anybody ever dust anymore?”, contrasting her mother’s meticulous weekly cleaning with her own mad dash with the Endust before guests arrive.
Apparently for many, household neglect is a source of pride. Go to any gift shop that bills itself as hip and sassy, and you will find cocktail napkins adorned with pictures of smiling 1950’s housewives, emblazoned with such cheeky legends as, “Housework is so much easier after I had my lobotomy!” And how many times at a party have you complimented someone on the food, only to be told, with a roll of the eyes, “I spent all day slaving in the kitchen!” The message is, Who has the time?
Today’s work schedules explain only part of the issue. People seem to have time for television and My Space, and all kinds of other activities. With the benefit of take-out and Swiffer wet-jet mops that look like children’s toys, the domestic arts can be reduced, we think, to a half hour or less. When we want to do something with our houses, how often is the answer not to dust the baseboards, but to head to Target instead for scented candles and new placemats?
Consumer culture also explains why, although actual cooking and cleaning may be in decline, home organization and elaborate decorating are in the ascendancy. The current mania for de-cluttering offers the flattering fantasy that, via empowered consumer choice, individuals can create a system to transcend once and for all the messiness of life—a spirit akin to all the great, and failed, utopian ideologies.
Whereas dust always returns. Famously composed largely of our own dead skin flakes, dust is a reminder of death and our own futile efforts to combat it. Now wonder we flee the task.
Our attempts to distance ourselves from dust, though, actually serve to alienate us from the material goods we strive so hard to acquire. We’ve seen on the news the houses of compulsive hoarders, piled high with collections of junk. But that same alienation also exists at the other end of the scale. In my younger days I was often a house sitter for wealthy families who seemed to live at a strange remove from their vaulted ceilings and Schumacher upholstery. On any day, their whole streets could have been the ruins of Pompeii, save for the slow crawl of white station wagons discharging quartets of laborers for Merry Maids.
Paradoxically, in the facing of death that housework requires, in the realization that we will never fully vanquish the dirty dishes, we celebrate life and our love for each other. A few years ago there was a book about Buddhist practice called, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. Perhaps, I propose, the laundry is the ecstasy. In my own Orthodox Christian tradition, monks kiss the spoons they use to stir, and bless the tools with which they clean and build.
In caring for the physical world, our hands touch eternity. Our houses are the temples of our lovemaking, the cradles of our children. Do they deserve anything less than a thoughtful—even if imperfect—tending?