Sawdust, Mashed Potatoes, and Little Boys

I'm having a lot more fun in our house these days. Our grown kids can attest to that. They could tell you tale after tale of my, well let’s just call it, serious preference for tidiness and order when they were growing up.

For instance, there was the time I had the powder room scrubbed and polished for company—complete with pristine, new hand towels and a sign I’d posted for the children: “Do NOT use these towels!!!!” An hour or two into the party, I suddenly noticed guests exiting the bathroom and wiping their hands on their clothes or furiously shaking and waving them dry. I’d forgotten to remove the sign.

Then there was the day lots and lots of chlorine bleach went into the washing machine along with my hopes of restoring graying socks to their original immaculate whiteness. A few days later, the boys came home looking miserable after basketball practice. They pulled off their sneakers to show me that the bleach had disintegrated the socks into whorls of strings wrapped around their toes and nothing but frayed cuffs around their ankles.

And so it went. That is, until my own mother died at age 85 and I saw firsthand that the home she’d dedicated a lifetime to straightening, organizing, and keeping spic and span passed quickly into the hands of a family who didn’t give one whit about a spotless house. It took them less than a week to strew their kids’ toys all over the yard and let the newspapers pile up on the porch.  Apparently, a sparkling clean house is not a very lasting legacy.

With that in mind, I quickly began challenging my beliefs about the “ideal” home. One quote I adopted came from the late comedic writer Erma Bombeck. She disagreed that cleanliness is next to godliness, pointing out that no one she knew had ever gotten a religious experience out of scraping burned-on cheese from the toaster oven. Amen! So now things are different at our house. 

Take tonight, for example.  The house will be clamoring with our three Cub Scout grandsons getting their racers ready for Saturday’s Pine Wood Derby event. There will be sawdust hitching rides on their shoes from the downstairs workshop to the upstairs kitchen.  There will be dripped paint, raucous arguing over who uses Pop-Pop’s hammer first, and handprints all over the bathroom towels from little boys who are having too much fun to remember to use soap. And there will be potato peelings and splatters on the kitchen counter, because while baked potatoes are far less messy, the boys love big piles of buttery mashed potatoes on their dinner plates.

And I will be okay with all of it, having challenged my beliefs about housekeeping, letting go of what doesn’t work, and embracing what does. And for tonight, that's sawdust, mashed potatoes, and boys who will only be Cub Scouts for a short while. Positive experiences just might create a different kind of legacy, And that's the kind I am choosing today.