Hello from Lake Superior, my friend!
I’ve been from LA to LS lately! (Los Angeles to Lake Superior) I’m writing to you from the latter.
Being in my hometown, and since I’m writing this on Mother’s Day, naturally, I’m thinking of my mom. Somehow a particular memory has wheedled into my brain, and I thought I’d tell you about it.
The cast of characters of today’s story: Cars, magazines, drop-in friends, frantic family members. The time is the 1960s.
The house where I grew up was out in the country. The road that led to our house went nowhere. There was one other home beyond ours (eventually a couple more), so there weren’t many cars rambling down our road. There was the occasional car that made a wrong turn off the main “highway” and would go past our house and then go past the other way when they made the turnaround and headed back to civilization. I think a “Dead End” sign was eventually put up, which always felt unpleasant to me, now that I think about it.
In the 1960s, of course, there was no texting. There were no cell phones on which to do so. Sure, we had telephones, but they were mounted on the wall and not in our back pockets. Nowadays, I don’t think people would dare to “drop in” on friends, but that wasn’t unheard of when I was a kid. Sometimes, out of the blue, a car would drive up and out would pop friends or family, dropping in unannounced.
An approaching car was always noteworthy. If a car came down our road and my mom was either at the kitchen sink or sitting in the recliner, both places offered a perfect view of the road approaching our house. If perchance, this car began to slow down and make like it was turning into our driveway, the frenzy would begin. Whether at the sink or in her chair, my mother’s eyes would become wide, and she’d shout with urgency:
“Pick up the magazines!!”
And, boy, howdy, we snapped to it! When my mom’s eyes widened and her voice was urgent, you did what you were told, buddy. I’m not sure why “the magazines” were her first area of concern when people approached. It’s not like we had salacious magazines lying around. No Playboy. Not even National Geographic. People would have seen scattered copies of Good Housekeeping and Family Circle. There were probably plenty of catalogs in that mix as well: JCPenney, Montgomery Wards, Sears. And the smaller ones like Miles Kimball and Lillian Vernon.
Why did my mom want us seen as people who didn’t read magazines? I wondered. No time or inclination to ask, however. Remember—wide eyes and urgency meant you adopted Nike’s slogan: Just do it! For the approximately 30 seconds it took for our drop-ins to get out of their car and walk to our front door, you can’t believe how fast three kids and a dad could pick up magazines! I can’t remember what we did with them; put them in a pile, I guess. Piles were acceptable. “Scattered” was not.
In contrast, when I was a young mom living in Delaware, I had a friend, Beth, who did not bother picking up magazines. Nor did she pick up much of anything else. We both had three little kids, all around the same age. Our husbands worked together at the same company in this small town. We became fast friends.
Oh, how I loved going to Beth’s house! As I’d walk in the door with my three kids in tow, you’d never know what you might find lying on the floor. This was during the early 1990s, and there may have been some video games, but for the most part, kids played with toys, and man, oh man, did they have toys at Beth’s house. I mean, All. Over. The. Floor. You’d have to step over or perhaps trip on at least half a dozen things between her front door and her kitchen. But you know what I loved? Beth never once said, “Oh, sorry for the mess.” The first thing she asked as I walked in, every single time, was this:
“Are you hungry? Can I make you a sandwich?”
I’m pretty sure I may have stepped over a sandwich in the hallway, actually.
Beth told me once that she always meant to pick up the house when the kids sat down to watch The Power Rangers in the afternoon. (Our kids were all crazy about the Power Rangers back then. I mean, CRAZY!) But then she said she liked the show, too, and sat and watched it with them!
I don’t fault my mom for wanting us to pick up the magazines when guests arrived. She kept a clean and tidy home, and having others think well of her and her family meant a lot to her. But I wish she could have relaxed a bit more and not worried about out-of-place magazines.
I find myself in the middle of this continuum. (I frequently find myself “in the middle” of things.) I can appreciate both points of view. No, I don’t want someone to break a leg tripping over something dropped on my floor last week and not picked up. But neither do I worry about someone seeing one of the gazillion book piles lying around my house.
This reminds me of the movement several years ago started by Marie Kondo and her Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. (I think that’s one of the books in one of my piles. It didn’t work for me.) Everyone was in a tidying-up frenzy for a while. We picked up magazines and then some. And then came “hygge,”—which told us to make our homes comfy. Comfy with pillows and blankets and coffee cups and plants and . . . . piles of books! I vote for hygge!
Wherever you fall on the neatness continuum, I hope you find comfort and peace within the walls of your home sweet home. And may you feel the same way about where you hang your hat as Laura Ingalls Wilder did when she said:
“Home is the nicest word there is.”
Written with love – – Patti XOXO