Happy & Healthy
CLEAN ENOUGH
by Maddy Stolk
Some people call it an obsession, I call it an organized character. I really like things to be neat. Not just a little neat – sweep it under the couch and no one sees it neat – no, I like disciplined order – everything neatly in line.
I find it incomprehensible when people open mail and drop the empty envelopes on the floor, take off their coat and throw it on the couch, leave their shoes and socks where they took them off. People who, in short, leave a trail of destruction through the serene landscape of my spotless home.
Now fate has it that I have many friends living abroad, preferably in the most exotic locations, who permanently open their homes for me. That fun works both ways, of course, so I have guests all the time. And they stay, just like fish, indeed fresh for three days. After that, it doesn't so much start to smell, but it does start to gnaw. A half-unpacked suitcase here, an overflowing toiletry bag there and – the horror – strange food remnants in my kitchen. My kitchen is in Amsterdam, the city where twelve mice come to claim them if you leave three breadcrumbs on the counter. All the sealed skirting boards, steel wool sponges in crevices, and electric rat zappers notwithstanding. If that bomb ever drops, I give the Amsterdam mouse more chance than that supposedly indestructible cockroach.
But anyway, my guests have known me longer than today, and as true friends do, they don't care about my neuroses.
‘Not used for half a year? Out of my house!’
A long time ago, when I lived in one house with six girlfriends, they called me ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’. Not because they saw me as the enemy or because we were exploring our boundaries in a soft-erotic way, but after the movie ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’. In this, Julia Roberts plays a tormented wife, married to a sociopathic control freak: towels must be this way, plates and pans must be stored like this. And woe betide if they are even a millimeter out of line, then there’s trouble – usually her head. It wasn't that bad with me, of course, but I can apparently look very displeased, because everything was always exactly where I had left it.
If someone needed something, it went something like this: ‘Do you have a Phillips screwdriver?’ ‘Yes, it's in the cabinet under my desk, in the third drawer from the top, behind the tape and the stapler, next to the pushpins.’
With this, I was ahead of my time, because a tidy house is a tidy mind (the chaos that normally takes place in there is not visible to the naked eye, but Jackson Pollock would lick his fingers at it. Or his brush) and that is in turn very mindful and zen, so voilà. In fact, I am a Marie Kondo avant la lettre, although I must say that I couldn't have come up with her slogan ‘Does it spark joy?’ (a question you should ask yourself about every item you own. No joy? Get rid of it.) myself. Stuff just doesn't spark that much joy for me. Significantly less in any case than traveling, my friends, or a good bottle of wine – preferably while traveling, with those respective friends.
For years I have lived by the creed: ‘Not used for half a year? Out of my house!’ Except for the Christmas lights and the electric garden saw – one should be prepared for everything. Marie has nothing on me. Except for a bestseller or four, but hey, there has to be something left to wish for in life, right?
