My wife fixed me with a gimlet eye. “It’s dish soap,” she pointed out. “You always need dish soap.”
“Though maybe,” she allowed, “we can throw out the bottles that expired in 2021. Especially if they smell funny.”
My wife and I have exciting domestic discussions like this every evening now. After 24 years of marriage, we have found a hobby to renew our bond and a new journey to embark on together.
And what is that new journey, you ask? We’re working together to dig ourselves out from under the accumulated detritus and tchotchkes of 24 years of marriage.
We realized how much clutter we had after downsizing
Neither my wife nor I have what you would call a passion for order. Overstuffed bookcases and closets — not to mention a fair amount of ambient cat hair — have been features of our life together since the beginning. But the mess really began to spiral out of control eight years or so ago when we moved to be nearer my daughter’s prospective high school.
The new house was smaller. Much smaller. And while we got rid of piles and piles of books and other things before we moved, we did not, as it turned out, get rid of enough.
Since then, it’s been a losing battle with jumble, muddle, and feral disarray. There’s a small room in the basement my wife intended to use as a walk-in closet, but it quickly filled with who knows what when we moved in, and we have made no progress in sorting through the mess, nor, for that matter in making it truly a closet that one can “walk in.”
The small spare guest room is host to piles of bedding and teetering stacks of napkins. (Yes, napkins. Don’t ask.) My desk in my small, theoretical office became unreachable under cat-scratching posts, broken printers, and cans of flavored water.
We decided to slowly declutter together
One day a few weeks ago, huddling in the one chair without a cat on it, I looked around and lamented, much like David Byrne, “This is not my beautiful house!” Then I cringed, because I cannot sing, and because the sound waves threatened to bring snowdrifts of magazines and junk mail down upon my head.
The cats were not impressed with my declaration. But my wife and I made a pact then and there; every day, we would fill one garbage bag with useless crap. We would beat back the clutter together.
And so far, it’s going pretty well. Sometimes, we huddle together and commiserate over the horror of jam that stopped being edible in 2018. Sometimes, we uncover pleasing remnants of our lives together, like our daughter’s old passport photo (cute!) or that dog toy we’d forgotten (the dog happily set about dismembering it). Sometimes, we find useful things (that’s where all our keys went!). Sometimes, we face deep existential questions like, “Do we still want to pretend we might make recipes from these cookbooks?” and “What on earth is that?”
We have discovered that we do, in fact, have countertops. I have found my desk. We can close the freezer door. The walk-in closet downstairs and the guest room are…well, OK, they’re still unusable. But, you know, we have dreams.
Some of you may say, “After 24 years of marriage, shouldn’t your dreams be bigger than cleaning your house!?” And sure, throwing out the extra pots isn’t exactly a sweeping tale of romance. But on the other hand, it’s nice to be reminded that there’s no one I’d rather collect pots and then throw them out with than the woman I married.
It’s taken us a quarter century to get into this mess, and now, we’re actually kind of enjoying trying to scrabble out of it together. Our brief enthusiasm for decluttering will probably pass, and we may gently slide back into chaos. But for now, we are united in our mission, and by the bittersweet realization that we never need to buy dish soap again.
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