I have a very nice intelligent neighbor. She goes through life trying to be true to spirit and trying not to judge. At least, so I would guess, from our limited but enjoyable conversations.
However, several times she has commented on my kitchen, which is, always has been, and probably always will be, a disaster area when I live on my own. They’re indirect, as when I was complaining that it had reached a point where even I couldn’t stand what it looked like, and she said (to me and the others at the table) “Oh Kes. As long as I’ve known you, your kitchen has been a disaster.” (This is not accurate, since she got to know me after feeding my cat while I was out of town. I don’t leave a dirty kitchen when I’m gone for a month. And I spend my very limited income partially on paying another neighbor $10 an hour to clean it when it gets so bad my physical self can’t keep up with it. It would have been far more accurate to say, "As long as I've known you, your kitchen has been winning.")
The other day, I’d been cleaning for a week and could never get it down to an acceptable level, and finally bribed that neighbor to come in and do the three hours of work it needed and I couldn’t.
Still, it’s always been a mess, because I’ve always felt there were more interesting things to do than clean the kitchen.
I hate cleaning kitchens. It’s not the work itself, which hadn’t used to be unpleasant until my back and knees gave out. Even though it’s painful now, it’s no more painful than, say, cleaning the bathroom, which I don’t mind doing and still do fairly regularly when I have the energy and everything doesn’t hurt.
But kitchens turn bad the same day you clean them. There’s an eternal feeling of filth, like the Augean Stables. You polish the counters and put away the dishes and wipe the stove and sweep the floor. Then you reward yourself with a cup of tea and a slice of toast and a good book, and … there you are, dirty dishes in or near the sink again, a stove requiring wiping, a kettle to be wiped and refilled with purified water, a water purifier to be filled with tap water, and a used napkin to throw in the laundry.
Cooking dinner’s even worse, and it’s impossible not to prepare dinners, at least most nights. If you try to eat real food, like vegetables, there are parings and peelings and tops and blossom ends, requiring a garbage to be filled up because one lives in a high rise, and there is no compost bin, and that requires emptying the garbage sooner or later, which is heavy and, with my knees, painful.
And so the trash stays in the kitchen longer than it should, beginning to smell and dropping stuff on the floor; the dishes stay in the sink until there are enough to justify filling the pan with suds, by which time there are pans stacked on the four feet of space the kitchen counter offers, with the latest groceries stacked among them because I can’t reach the cupboards when there’s anything on the counter. (I wonder if being 5’2” could be argued to be a disability requiring reasonable accommodation.)
I like leaving the kitchen. It’s not as if I ate in it, or ever did anything in there but cook and clean. While I like cooking, I don’t like cooking in a kitchen the size of my uncle’s galley on his 22’ boat. And cleaning is dull, without someone to talk to while doing it. Someone to distract me.
Jeannie is trying to give me positive reinforcement. “But don’t you just feel spiritually better?” she asks, meaningly. “Don’t you feel like it declutters your soul?”
I have a confession. I lived with a clean freak, though she simply viewed herself as “tidy.” The kitchen was usually perfect; I did lots more cleaning than I do living by myself, and she did quite a bit as well. And I hated it.
It looked sterile. When my living room is tidy, it still has comforting things in it: a patterned couch, a throw or two, a bokhara rug, a recliner and my aunt’s old table; not to mention a few inexpensive but good originals on the wall, and a small shark made by my stepson years ago when he was young and liked me.
But every time I’ve lived with people who think the Kitchen Has to be Clean and make sure it is, walking into the kitchen depresses me. It reminds me too much of people with petty bourgeois values. Their kitchens are always simply workrooms, which shouldn’t be depressing but is, or are prettified with the kind of items that are supposed to be functional but never are, like canisters with cows on them or dishtowels which are never used.
I have other friends who have clean kitchens – or, at least, they’re clean when I’m visiting -- but that’s a different thing entirely. They keep some of the food on the counter, in jars or baskets, as if food were the point of a kitchen. Their canisters don’t match unless they happened to come as a set – but then there are lots of other unmatching things around as well. Sometimes they have a kitchen table, sometimes they don’t. There are cat food and/or dogfood dishes on the floor. It feels homey. A kitchen with everything put away except for a few designed for display sucks my spirit out of me.
The many years I lived with S did one thing to me, and that wasn’t make me neater. It made me driven about trying to keep the kitchen clean. So now that I have little energy and hardly any mobility, I feel as though the kitchen were the most important room to clean, even though objectively, I don’t believe that at all. And, as I’ve suggested, it never gets clean; it appears so for a few minutes until the first dish is dirtied, and then you have to clean all over again. So I never get to cleaning the rooms I always felt important any more.
I used to have neat livingrooms. When I lived near campus, I liked to invite an entire class over. The kitchen was generally not for guests, but the living room was comfortable and welcoming. The surfaces were mostly clear, or full of the kinds of papers students have; the books were in the bookcase, and the cat moved from lap to lap, utterly delighted. (I mention her because many people put their cats away for company; but one thing I’ve learned teaching college is the only item students universally get homesick for are their pets. So I always made sure they had access to mine.)
I remember when I was an undergraduate, I was involved in a conversation with a woman somewhat older than I, who worked in Student Services. “Do you have any idea why making a bed might be important?” she asked, not at all rhetorically. “Is there any reason on earth to make a bed, besides we’re supposed to?”
I thought about it. Where I grew up, instead of dust, we had sand, blowing through the always-open windows. Putting a cover on a bed in such circumstances was necessary. You haven’t been miserable until you’ve tried to sleep in a sandy bed, too tired to get up and clean it out, too uncomfortable to sleep. But otherwise, no. Why bother? If the good opinions of others mattered to you on truly shallow things like unmade beds, you could always shut the door. If you had no door, you could take a sheet and hang it over the entrance. There are many more fun things to do in life than make a bed.
I always had a clean bathroom. My ex would comment bitterly on the kitchen, never noticed anything about the living room. I was really fussy about things on the dinnertable, but she and our kid would drop stuff there as if it didn’t matter, and never noticed when I moved it. I scrubbed the toilets and the sink and counter of the bathrooms regularly, except the one which took too many steps to go down to. In 12 years together, I’m not sure S noticed even once, and did not remove cleaning demerits for it, because clean bathrooms don't count in a kitchen-centered cleaning economy. I don't resent that particularly -- not even then -- because so far as I could tell, she reflected the cleaning priorities of Iowa, where she grew up and we still lived.
My spirit is less cluttered in a clean bathroom, but whose wouldn’t be? Or rather, who can feel comfortable in a dirty bathroom, even if the rings are just rust stains? And it’s essential to have an accessible living room and table surfaces, in order to live like a civilized human being. A mark of my depression the last few years is that I have neither. Failing at the kitchen is my new priority, apparently above succeeding at having comfortable living spaces where guests can visit.
Partly, I suppose, it’s class consciousness coming to the fore again. After 20 years of my mother repeating her mother’s litany: “Only servants eat in the kitchen,” somewhere I’ve absorbed the concept that the kitchen doesn’t count as Our space. And there’s also the feeling that fundamentally, I really don’t care. If there’s counter space and sufficient storage, what else matters? So I really, really mind all the backhanded comments about my kitchen – mostly because they’re intended to somehow motivate me to care about something I really, really never cared about at all.
But what I really want to say to them?
Yes, civilized people have civilized kitchens. You think that is an automatic good, but it’s not. Using chemical cleaners which destroy our water table and soil and land in general, being in a tearing hurry to dump solids down the toilet because you don’t have a disposal, hiding the product of any meal – that is civilized only in the sense that it shows hostility for nature.
Louise Bogan once wrote, “Women have no wilderness in them.” She was wrong. She had just known too many kitchen-centric women, clearly.
Because wilderness is untidy. I know. I’ve seen it; I always wanted to live in it. The nearest I ever got was gardening. Yes, vegetable and flower growers make plans which improve the chances of things we like surviving. But if a seed or two or 20 volunteers, or the colors are unexpected, or a bean pops up where the corn stalks are supposed to be, who cares? It’s delightful, really.
We weed, generally – again, survival of our preferred vegetation matters. But in my case, anyway, I don’t see another gardeners’ product and notice what’s wrong with it, unless she’s really insistent and wants to know. I notice the green, and the many colors, and the little plump things which will be eggplants or zucchini or peppers someday; or the rounded ends of root vegetables pushing up, certain of their welcome.
True wilderness is even wilder than that. Things live where they have to, not where they’re planted: the seeds are scattered everywhere. Where they are welcome, they root. They try a place out and if it doesn’t work, they die – or move, a root at a time. Salt edges into the soil where wild roses grow, and the roses adjust. Small things live in the tidepools, or hidden deep in the wet sand. Young trees flower while the old trees block most of their light. Everything eats something – animals and plants take turns in our life cycle.
I know not all gardeners are like this. Perhaps there are kitchen-centric people and wilderness-centric people; those who welcome the unexpected, the uninvited, the strength of the universe forcing its way through all deterrents, rock or pests or concrete or weedcloth. And there are those whose greatest pleasure in gardening, like kitchens, is to remove all detritus and not allow anything to stay uninvited.
And there are those of us who can no longer physically walk out of the house and sit on a driftwood log by the ocean and just watch all day. But we can walk out of our kitchens, and do something as worthwhile with our time. We can at least search for NATO pictures to see what our neighbors in the universe look like, or google Beaches and remember where we came from. We are wilderness-centric; it is earth and sea and sky which declutter our souls, not a clean sink and dishes put away.