Of Dust Bunnies and Other Domestic Horrors.

The plight of a working mother with two jobs is made worse with a choice. The choice was, do I continue writing, or give it up to be a better housekeeper, a better mother, a better wife. I gave it up—for almost a week. I found out I’m a better wife and mother if I can exercise my craft. I write, therefore, I am.

But that says nothing for my housekeeping. With only so many hours in the day—and night—something gets left out. Let’s face it, would anyone rather do housework than anything else in the world, say, even a root canal?

Each week, I squeeze out an hour or two to run the sweeper, man a dust rag and toss a few things in the laundry (only what’s absolutely needed to dress myself or my child) and spend the rest of the time in pursuit of the creative. Everything changes. Some changes are good.

Recently my day job offered the opportunity to work from home. I thought it over for a long time. It’s a lot to consider. Do I wish to always be in my own home, to never leave during the daylight hours, to not have coworkers surrounding me and laughing? As it turned out, I decided I could live with it. It was the advent of winter that sealed the deal. The thought of my pretty red sporty car on the snow and ice was enough to scare my hair white.

The things you discover when you’re in your own home twenty-four hours a day are mind-boggling. One of those things is that the housekeeping gene in my family is dominant. I thought it had skipped my generation. I thought it might actually be a disease that only affects those in my family such as my grandmother and my mother. We suffered through a childhood of demands, such as, “Pick up your shoes,” “Clean your room,” “Your turn to do dishes,” and “Is this where you found it? Clean up this mess!”

I now hear those words flying from my own mouth. I swore it wouldn’t happen, but it’s happening. The twelve-year-old princess is finding out what it’s like to live with a stay-at-home mom. I don’t think she’s pleased. Those chores do pile up.

For the first few weeks at home I tried to turn a blind eye. Then it hit me all at once. I’ve lost control of my life. There are things in my house that I’m ashamed of, other things I cannot find, and still other things so disorganized I cannot figure them out.

Then the new year hit. The Christmas decorations were stored away for another year and the place looked like a warmed-over version of hell. Still, I tried to ignore it. Nagging feelings of total chaos danced in my head. It even got to the point where I could no longer write. It’s too much chaos!

Things had to change, so, New Year’s resolutions:

1.       Clean this Mother Hubbard (censored expletive) of a house.

2.       Be kinder to myself and others.

3.       Wrestle back control of my life.

It came to a head one day while working at my day-job. I work for a call center, answer questions for those who call in and ask. There is no room for errors. So, as I researched the needed information, I was brutally attacked. That’s right, attacked. A small horde of vicious dust bunnies took flight and went for my eyes. Thinking fast, I put my caller on hold and went on the defensive, swatting and swinging until the nasty creatures were subdued.

After the call, I took my break and went on the hunt for that horrifying, unnatural being known as the domestic dust bunny. It was the dog who had flushed them from their hiding places. The evidence was quite literally written on her poor face in the form of fuzzy gray balls of fluff. She looked confused, upset and not a little terrified. Something had to be done. The malicious creatures had taken on life and were stealing the dog’s food and socks from the laundry monster. Unbelievable.

I was on a mission. Over the next few days I tore into each room, tracking and hunting, evicting spiders along the way as I sought out self-animated and self-aware dust bunnies. It was in the man cave where I found the breeding ground. I was at war and the stakes were high. At one point I even thought about using my husband’s old shotgun. I won’t tell you what I did about the thought, but the husband was not amused. The most difficult part was patching the holes in the floor, walls and door.

They’re all gone now.

Still, there were my goals for this year. There are things that stand in the way of such lofty goals—things such as the laundry monster and the mail beast.

The laundry monster is pretty well self-explanatory. We’ve all experienced such creations of our own making. The pile grows higher and higher until an avalanche threatens to destroy lives. After getting the many missing socks from the now-vanquished dust bunnies, the pile grew higher. I started on it straight away.

What to do while waiting for the laundry was to tackle the mail beast. This creature is a bit more rare. We don’t throw out our junk mail. We don’t have a shredder, but we have a fireplace. One does not fire up the fireplace in the heat of the summer, so one stores the mail until such time as a fire is feasible.

By that time, feasibility of a fire was not an issue. The mail beast was. It was too large to tackle. It was spreading its piles across the counters, reproducing asexually and making a bid for world domination. Cooking meals was becoming risky.

You see, it wasn’t a matter of scooping it off the counter and making trips to the fireplace. The problem was it wasn’t all junk mail. There were needed documents in the beast, documents that weren’t a priority, but needed to be sorted from the belly of the beast and filed away. Daunting at best.

So, while the laundry was going, and the dust was settling, the mail had to be sorted. I was well through it all, had most of it sorted into piles according to subject or into the flames when I ran across something startling—a letter from one of my best friends. It was dated July, 2013.

Chaos ensued and won the day while I stopped to read the coveted, rare, hand-written, post-marked letter. When was the last time you got such a rare treat? I nearly did a jig of joy. (Okay, I did the dance since no one was looking.)

The mail beast was left in its sorted piles while I answered the letter with five rambling pages of hand-written silliness. It had to be answered immediately. It had waited for an answer for six months.

The letter is now in the mail and when I glanced over, I saw that the beast was once more trying to retake it’s former shape, although much reduced in size. Meh, I’ll worry about it tomorrow.

He Was Just A Boy

Over 60 years ago, a young talented musician enlisted in the army. He was no more than 16, running away from the regimented life his mother had carved out for him. His search was for adventure, heroism, the world in general.

A pretty youth, Jack McCormick was a virtuoso with a violin. After his father’s death while Jack was still a small boy, his mother struggled to earn enough for her son to study music under a great maestro. His talent blossomed, but the teen-aged Jack wanted more than the beauty of his strings to stir his imagination.

Studying the classical styles of all the greats before him left him empty. He wanted more. At fourteen, he began sneaking out at night, entering the honky-tonks and back alley bars to entertain with his magical fiddle. When his dear and beloved mother found out, his life as a honky-tonk man was over.

So Jack ran away. He wanted the world, but what he got was World War II.

On the verge of budding manhood, he stepped into the hell of war. When most boys were chasing skirts, working at the family business or finishing school, he was fighting for his life.

In his haste to escape his home, Jack had to leave behind everything including his violin. Homesickness became his worst enemy. It dogged his every step through Europe.

On a particularly rainy day, thousands of miles from home, Jack was assigned to guard some captured German soldiers. They were encamped in the open, no shelter to be found. It was cold; the men were injured and hungry. Sickness was making the rounds.

A run-off stream of rainwater had formed, wending its way through the prisoners, carrying with it the broken debris created by war. Among the items floating in the water was a violin case. A German officer grabbed it, found its strings intact. After tuning it, he began to play.

Jack watched from a short distance, his keen eyes looking on with longing. Still just a kid, his desire to touch it over-came his orders to patrol the area. Having learned a smattering of German in his travels, he managed to ask the prisoner if he could have a look at it.

The German, hoping to curry favor with the young boy, handed it to him with great care. Jack caressed the gentle curves of the beautiful instrument, plucking the strings, sighing brokenly. A picture of his mother in the dank little kitchen back home, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, formed in his mind. He felt the touch of home in the wood and strings of the violin.

Handing his gun off to a buddy, he gently cradled the instrument under his chin and drew the bow across its strings. His eyes closed as he lost himself in Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D. The glorious notes floated over the French countryside causing more than one hardened soldier to stop and draw breath. As the story goes, even the rain stopped, the clouds parting to allow the sun to bask in the splendor of the music.

When Jack finished and opened his eyes again, the German officer was silently weeping. Jack tried to hand the instrument back to the prisoner, but, in perfect English, the man told him to keep it. “It is meant for you,” he said.

Jack carried that old fiddle with him through every trench and battlefield until his tour ended. He took it home with him. It was the only instrument he would use, even when he was playing for Benny Goodman and his orchestra. Every day he wondered what had happened to the German officer who was so affected by his music. He never saw the man again.

Thirty years later, he was still carrying that old fiddle when he met and married my Aunt Alice. She was a beauty with the voice of an angel. It was love at first sight. They’d both been married before; both had grown children and grandchildren. They’d both suffered much in their lives, and saw in one another something akin to salvation.

I remember how he played. I loved to listen to them both. Alice would bring the house down with her powerful voice and Jack would lift it up again with the passion of his violin. When we lost Alice a few years back, we thought Jack would never recover. He did his best to carry on, finally moving away to be close to his children.

I got a call today. Jack is gone. He lost the passion for his music when the voice of his angel was silenced. He lost his life when cancer took its terrible hold. They both will live forever in my memory, and between them, he carries that old fiddle.