July 22nd, 2025
The house is a mess.
Well, I guess it all depends on how you define the word “mess”. When I was in the Army, decades ago, I liked to have things organized, with everything in its place. That was so long ago and so much has changed.
Now, I live with my wife of forty years, and with our four-year-old grandson. Neither of them has much interest in tidiness. Our home is clean, but it is always teetering on edge of chaos. I’m not sure that it can be any other way.
My wife is from Germany, and in some ways, she maintains that Teutonic passion for order. However, she is also an artist, which means that she is a perfectionist with regards to her work, but is often indifferent to clutter that surrounds us. Karin is a fiber goddess. She has spent well over sixty years mastering the mysteries of knitting, weaving, crocheting, dyeing, spinning, sewing and felting fiber. She can do it all. When focused on a project, she is attuned to the smallest flaw or discrepancy in her work. She is endlessly creative. However, she also struggles to find her phone and car keys.
Our grandson, Asher, is a four-year-old who, like his Oma, is interested in all sorts of things, usually all at the same time. He dumps out his toys, plays with them enthusiastically, and then promptly forgets them. Eventually, the floors in the house acquire a thin covering of playthings, some of which I sometimes step on. I find that irritating.
I try to pick things up and put them away, but apparently, I am not supposed to do that. Our grandson protests loudly if I move a toy from the place where he has put it. He wants, or needs, things to be in a certain location. So, after experiencing his wrath, I just leave stuff where it lays. My wife has worked out a deal with the boy for him to stow away all of his stuff at the end of the day in exchange for some time to watch mindless YouTube videos. I go to bed early before all this happens, and when I get up it looks like the cleanup fairies have done their work while I was in bed.
My wife has a one room for a craft studio. Actually, most of the rooms in the house are also unofficial craft studios. Her projects cover most of the horizontal surfaces in our home. To an objective observer, her primary craft studio looks like a grenade exploded in it. I have sometimes made forays into her sacred space, but not often. I avoid moving anything. If I do, without fail, she will ask what happened to the object that I set in a different place. It is best for me, when I get annoyed by the apparent disorder in her studio, that I simply close the door to the room and move on.
My wife and grandson are selectively organized. Maybe all people are. Trying to keep everything in order would make a person crazy, or crazier. I have also become selective about how tidy my world needs to be. Some things matter. Most don’t.
Frank is Emptiness 