The Perfectionistic Farmer
It’s very hard for me to live amongst things and spaces that are dirty. I hate mess and I hate clutter. I throw away more things than I save. My wife is constantly upset with me because I am cleaning things she is still using. I clean her cups that she is drinking from, I sweep the places where she is standing, I do laundry when there is hardly any to do and then feel guilty about wasting water in the desert. I love to vacuum and recently, in the last few years, have come to love a shop vac as well. They really have more power and can suck up a lot more dirt. Vacuums break and get things stuck in them — shop vacs are relentless and tireless. They are fearless suckers that take all things big and small into their mouths.
Recently, my in-laws came to visit us on the farm. They already live on a farm in upstate New York. Their house is an 1800’s old train station that was converted into a huge living space, divided into two sections — one section for the grandparents and one for the newly formed family. It is a generational home. They have five acres, chickens, pig pens and funky but functional gardens. My wife definitely draws her inspiration from these humans. They gifted her with a love for homesteading, farming, canning food, cooking and living among things that are messy. Essentially there is an entire room in my in-laws home that is devoted only to mess and most importantly, mud. This is, of course, the mudroom. You probably know about The Mudroom. You are rolling your eyes right now about the obviousness of a mudroom, but you guys, I did not grow up with a mudroom. I grew up with white carpet and one of those wet vacuums that you had to fill with water because it would suck up more of the dog hair and you could also use it on the curtains, kind of like a steamer. Wet vacuums left our house with less dust and most proficiently cleaned our white carpets. They also took the most time to prepare for the cleaning and then to clean after the cleaning was done. We spent just as much time cleaning the vacuum as we did cleaning the living room.
My father-in-law is a large man — my guess is close to 300 pounds. He is loud and takes up a lot of space — physically and energetically. His stuff takes up a lot of space, his size 12 boots occupy half of the kitchen, his belt is large and his gun case is large. His cough is loud, his sneeze is loud, his voice is booming and he listens to the Yankees game at full volume. When he eats, he drops food on himself and the floor, he tracks dried dirt all over the house, he sits down in chairs so hard I release my breath every time the chair does not buckle underneath his weight. Thank you sturdy wood. Thank you trustworthy chair. He leaves the toilet seat up and doesn’t always hit his mark, I step around sticky residue on the bathroom floor. He leaves hair on the bar of soap and a film of black tar around the tub. The first night he was here, we gave him our bed. He took his socks off and rubbed his bare feet under our blankets. No shower. No clean socks. Just bare, sweaty farm feet that had been walking around our property all day and bending down to build pig pens.
I try to brush it off. I try to talk myself off the ledge of wanting everything clean. I say to myself, “Jen, you grew up in a white, waspy house. Everything was neat and ordered. It’s what you learned. It’s how your mother taught you to live. It’s good to learn another way. It’s good to be pushed out of your comfort zone. You can loosen up and value life and mess over perfectionism and cleanliness.” I want to be different. I want to be one of those people who leaves their art materials out all night — whose house has kids running all around it and goats jumping on and off the kitchen table. That is a house with life being lived in it. Those people are not worried about keeping their floors clean. They are having fun. They are laughing and tickling their children and overlooking the mud. These people are free people. They are carefree people. They are breastfeeding on the floor while their cat is giving birth to kittens. They are eating buttered toast while they water their garden. God I want to be one of those people. They have papers and children’s tutus all over their car — they tell you to get in and to not mind the mess. They don’t apologize for their mess because they are not sorry about it. They do not presume there is anything to be sorry for. They do not apologize for living in the space they inhabit. They bring wounded animals inside their homes and place them on the couch. They have candles that drip on their kitchen tables, they draw on their walls and they take polaroids. They have cake batter splattered on their cupboards and pictures of their kids in face paint on their fingerprinted and sticky refrigerators. These people know how to live.
I, on the other hand, am day dreaming about when I can take our bed comforter to the organic dry cleaner because our dog has spent the last twenty minutes masturbating on it and has left little wet marks all over our Pendleton comforter.
My wife grew up in that kind of house — the house with mess and life. I grew up in a quiet, sterile, white-carpeted house with NPR playing faintly in the background.
Needless to say, our farm is messy right now. Everything is in disarray. We have been here for five months and I look around and things look disheveled. Our farm looks like I put my head out the window of a fast moving car for twenty minutes and let my hair blow around. There are piles of dirt, holes that have been excavated, stumps that have been removed without anything to take their place, piles of old wood stacked for burning, chainlink fences, a garage door that do not close property, wood that is dry and needs desperately to be stained, bare trees that do not have their leaves back yet, cement that is chipping away because of the salt I placed on it this winter when I was trying to melt the ice, old sinks that have been removed and taken apart and left to the mercy of the desert sun. We have a lot of work to do and I am overwhelmed. Nothing is in its place and nothing feels clean.
My wife cleaned our bathroom today and I cried in relief. There is life everywhere and I am having trouble letting it in. I want to push against it, stop it, make my world smaller and more controlled. I want to strap it down, Velcro it in place, nail it, shut it, cement it, squash it. I envision my life in a condo where all the appliances are new and the walls are freshly painted white. All I would have to do is open my laptop and sit on a barstool, typing away while I look at the digital clock on the recently installed stove that I never cook on. I could buy a condo. I could live in St. Petersburg, Florida. I could do it. I would buy a moped and go to yoga on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My life would be neat, organized and clean.
Now, our stove continuously reads 1:53pm and everyone always asks, “Is that really the time?!” They are shocked because it never seems like it should be 1:53pm and it never is. No, that is not the time. The clock on the stove is broken and has not worked for twenty years. When we bought this property, the stove we inherited is the original stove that was placed into our kitchen in the 1970’s. I’m sure that at one point in time it was a fine stove. We should have negotiated with the owners to put in a new stove when we purchased the property but we did not. We only saw the property once before we made an offer on it and overlooked the old stove with the clock that is eternally stuck at 1:53 pm.
Last week, when my in-laws took out the rusted vent that sits above our stove, a dried up, dead rat fell out of the vent. It fell out onto our stove where we eat and cook our food. There are, in fact, whole nations of rats living in our ceiling — compiling stacks of dried chili peppers to help insulate our walls. My father-in-law was adamant about putting poison out for the rats, which we did. He was concerned about them chewing through our electrical wires and starting a fire in our home. I am not entirely sure that would be a bad thing — we could collect insurance money and start a new build from the ground up.
