Threat of Company & Clean Houses

What is it about the threat of company coming over that impulses most of us to suddenly start vacuuming and doing dishes? Perhaps we don’t want people to see how we really live.

Yesterday after I was finished watering the gardens and cleaning out the chicken coop, my partner suggested we call our friends who are currently living in a hotel while their house is being renovated and invite them over for dinner. Now, mind you, this dinner wasn’t going to be prepared by me, but simply implanted the idea of getting takeout and bringing it over to our house. We figured they were probably tired of wrestling three to four little ones in a restaurant and thought our backyard deck would be a nice reprieve as the kids could roam the yard freely and eat fried chicken while watching live chickens stare back at them as if telling them, “I know what you’re eating!”

So, even though we were planning to eat outside, I had a ton of dishes and pans that needed to be cleaned, and the floor needed to be swept or vacuumed. My partner decided that vacuuming would be better and kicked the dog outside and started doing so. About halfway through he gets a call from our friends saying that they’d rather go out to eat at a different restaurant and thanked us for the offer. I can’t be mad, as they wanted to go to Sweet Tomatoes and we were craving Kentucky Fried Chicken because clearly their choice was probably in the much healthier range of choices. And besides, the dishes got done and the floor got vacuumed and we ended up getting our fried chicken and eating out on the deck with our chickens staring at us from the coop, crowing, “I know what you’re eating!”

This all got me thinking, why do we feel the need to tidy up for other people but not ourselves? I know that I feel less stress and happier in a clean house than I do with a damned quilt I don’t want to make sitting out on top of the ironing board in the dining room for the last month begging to be finished and dust bunnies that seem to reproduce like their namesake. However, I don’t always feel the need to keep the house as clean as it could be when it is just the two of us and we rarely have company over.

Perhaps I should do what some people do, and no, not those who leave their house a complete disaster where you have no idea if they have carpet or hardwood floors because you’ve never seen them before and just traversing through their house is like an obstacle course, but keep the house company ready at all times. Hmmm… perhaps this is a little ambitious. Maybe keep the projects left out to a minimum and the dishes kept up on, the latter of which I’ve been pretty good at doing, with the exception of the last few days. The former on the other hand…