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Signs of Life

Nancy L. Horner

Visitors

There’s one really wonderful thing about having a relative or friend from far away drop by, but it’s probably something I shouldn’t admit. I have to clean my house. I won’t go into great detail, but I’m married to an absent-minded professor archetype and have two boys. In my eyes, that explains the post-tornado look we regularly maintain. Having said that, I sincerely hope there are other people in the world who find visitors are the only real incentive for serious housecleaning.

Because we live a solid 500 miles from relatives, those visits don’t come very often. My local friends are used to our chaos, but mothers are another story entirely. I always panic because my mother grew up with the words, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" pounded into her head. Naturally, that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I try to get the house ready for my mother's visits.

Essentially, preparing for a visit from my mother means stirring up and angering a lot of poisonous spiders who were being happily reclusive, then dumping all this crap in the middle of the floor, staring at it and saying, "Hmm, what should we do with THAT, ya think?"

The solution, when I’m in charge, is to buy a bunch of 13-gallon bins from Walmart, toss everything that isn’t nailed down or propped neatly on a shelf into those bins, and then tuck them into any available corner, closet, attic or garage space we can find. Regardless of how much I clean, the results will not be good enough for my mother. And, if anybody passes this column on to my mom, I want you to know your life is in serious danger.

My husband ended up in charge of the cleaning on one very memorable occasion. I had been taking a weekend paralegal course in which a full year’s coursework was crammed into six weekends. The final weekend was coming up when my mother-in-law called to tell us that she was exhausted from all the wedding planning she had been doing for my sister-in-law’s wedding and, "We’d like to get away for a couple days. Could we come down to your house?"

My initial reaction was to babble incoherently about the paralegal class, but I finished the conversation with, "You’re welcome to come any time." Because my in-laws visit so infrequently, I couldn’t fathom turning them down. However, I did tell them that I was finishing up my paralegal course and wouldn’t be able to spend much time, if any, with them because I had a case study to complete and the entire six weeks’ material to review.

When they decided they were definitely going to visit, I turned to my husband and said, essentially, "They’re all yours." I had absolutely zero time for cleaning and for five weeks I had barely even attempted to do even the most essential chores, instead foisting those they could handle on husband and teenager.

"I’ll need a list," said my husband. "I have to fix things like that hole in the wall. My parents can’t see that." A list, I knew, was unlikely to work on my chaotic, Type-Z personality husband. If he could manage to get himself going, he’d likely quit after the first item. The corner molding he told me he’d nail into the kitchen corners "tomorrow" was still in the garage, eight years after the fact. Ah well, I thought, and I wrote the list with my husband’s habits in mind:

David’s Do-List
1. The kids’ bathroom wall
sand
patch
paper
2. Kids’ bathroom door ­ repair the whatchamacallit. You know, the thingyjigger that lets you actually close the door so it latches shut.
3. Sweep and mop kitchen floor. I’d clean out the corners and such, too.
4. Overhaul front living room
Put away superfluous books and stuff
Put away shoes, toys, and other nonsense
Vacuum
5. Kitchen things:
Put in corner molding & paint it. Sheesh! That’s an 8-year job, if ever I’ve seen one.
Paint over the green mess.
Paint the ceiling.
Ah, just paint it all, babe.
6. ("Six? I mean, isn’t this getting a bit excessive?")
7. Clean den. That speaks for itself.
8. ("Please, I’m a man. That’s all I can handle.")
9. Clean that mess around the laundry room door. Gack, what a disaster.
10. If you get this far, you’re a better man than I’m willing to admit.
ANY COMPLAINTS OR GOOFING WILL RESULT A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF EMBARRASSMENT. THEY’RE YOUR PARENTS, AFTER ALL. DO NOT GOOF OFF.

To my utter amazement, not only did my husband patch the hole in the wall, he managed to tidy the house to about the same level I usually manage for my own mother. Yes, he filled up about a dozen empty bins. The corner molding is still in the garage, though. And, I should warn you that anyone who passes this on to my in-laws won’t be surprising them a bit.