Cleanliness

I remember as a little girl going over to my neighbor's house. Linda was my mom's good friend and lived a few houses up the hill from us. The thing about her house that I remember most of all is the banister. It was so slick and shiny and polished, it shone like glass, and I would imagine sliding down on it. At the time I didn't know what that kind of clean meant. But two summers ago I found out while at a wedding. Linda was there and she was admiring my kids and how I too had grown. And she said this to me: kids are messy--don't miss out on spending time with them by always cleaning up. She told me she regretted worrying over the look of her house and wished she had relaxed more into playing with her two sons and letting them roam more freely without worry of what kind of mess it made when they were young. I swear some days it feels like all I do is pick up and for every one thing I make right the kids make a mess of 10 more. Phoenix is constantly tossing things on the floor. Fisher is forever dragging every pillow and blanket in the house to construct forts. Every day I step on scraps of paper and nubs of crayons and marker caps and string. Unstick stickers from windows. Move the furniture back where it belongs. And now I find myself imagining that banister. And the woman who fretted over it. And what that kind of cleanliness meant. And then I sigh into the moment, letting things be while they are where they are. This is our version of "picked up":

 If you look closer you'll see toys and balloons and bits of randomness under every available option. This is pretty much as good as it gets these days. That art piece of Fisher's taped to the wall in the above photo--that is what he's going to bring to the pool next summer to make the water darker he says. I'm still finding triangle paper cut outs all over the place, and summer is a long way off...