Rudi and I hate to clean. And we’re lazy. Which means that neither of us cleans beyond the bare minimum (cat boxes get changed, dishes get washed, laundry is done, bed gets made(ish)). But short of that, we’re a piling kind of household.

This is not without problem, of course. As time goes on, I get stressed, discouraged, and agitated. Rudi goes out on longer bike rides to avoid the mess.

Eventually, it all comes to a head, usually precipitated by an impending visit by guests. Or, as is currently the case, our new mattress arrives just days before our vacation. And then we go into a frantic, day-after-day cleaning frenzy.

This is not a pace that a normal human can sustain. This is not behavior we can maintain. Plus, we just have too much stuff, which just means our piles get moved about, cleaned, and temporarily re-sorted.

So after the crisis is over and the guests have gone home, our piles creep back out. (There is that infamous tree-trimming party where after all our guests left, we looked at the bed, covered with stuff from all our public spaces that we’d run out of time to deal with, and just gave up. Rudi unfolded the couch and spend the night there and I shifted a few things and slept amidst the piles. It was a sad night we hope never to have to repeat.)

We don’t aspire to be ascetics. We’re both content and comfortable with a certain amount of untidiness. We like our books and music, our bikes and yarn. But we do seem to require some outside force to keep our messy tendencies in check.

What we really need is a standing weekly date when people come over. Then there’s only a limited time period when we can create new or reformatted piles before we have to deal with them again.

Would one of you mind volunteering to come for dinner every week? Our mental health would certainly appreciate it.