Tidying and making mess

Oh weekends - you are too short! I am busy tidying up my nest this weekend - trying to get that mound of clothes back in the cupboard where it belongs (it is the 'oops, not that one, couldn't possibly wear that colour today' and the 'oh shit the hem is down' pile), trying to get rid of the pile of dishes that built up through the week based on my general laziness and also the unfortunate incident where my dishwashing detergent fell out of the open window (I am on the 1st floor...) never to be found again. Seriously - where did it go? Probably didn't help that I didn't go looking for it for a day or two... Other top of the list housework tasks include taming the fridge, washing, and ironing clothes ready for the week (I succumbed a few months back and bought an iron). Thinking nice, tidy, efficient little house to make everything that little bit easier and more streamlined. Lunchboxes for work, and outfit planning in advance and all that jazz.

BUT... housework always has to vie with all my mess making activities for my time - bouts of half done letter writing all over the dining room table, some kind of painting /drawing / inky fun, cake baking, or all my non-housework activities such as just vaguing off out the window, or reading, or resting on the couch with my cat asleep in my lap, or bath having, or wafting off to bookshops to browse and drink coffee. I have to reconcile myself to the fact that actually, I don't mind mess, I rather like it. I feel like when my house is messy there is an expansiveness to it, an openness, and invitation and permission to spreadout and do things, rather than an unspoken request to keep things neat and inward and contained. Train chat this week with fellow commuter turned to this subject, and I had to laugh when she confessed she'd always been messy from a very early age and her mother had despaired (me too! me too!). I had a happy childhood and was always messy, had no interest at all in tidying my room (yeah I know, who did?!). Some of my happiest memories were the grubbiest - painting a dog kennel bright green with a friend and deciding it would be much more fun to paint each other green too, helping mum dig a fishpond out of the muddy puddle we had made by soaking with the hose, stripping off and with a gaggle of other kids using the mud to become mud monsters - sticking lawn clippings onto the mud and trying to see whether it worked as camouflage by hiding in the garden from our parents. And surely when we were very very little we enjoyed our food smeared everywhere because we had no concept of dirtiness, no aversion to messiness, we were just a bundle of sensation?

Surely there are worse things? (eg. a cousin of mine who throughout her childhood was so scared of her father's military precision that she would cry when she got her hands dirty or clothes dirty because she knew she'd be severely told off...)

Train friend said that she's come to realise that what she likes about a 'lived in' house is the layers, the trails of everyday life that are visible. Whether that is a book half-read put by the side of the chair, or a wine glass, or a half-done project, or even a pair of knickers on the floor. She said that she now understands it and doesn't try to sterilise her living environment of these traces of daily life. (Although occasionally finds herself cleaning the bath late at night if she's stressed about other things).