I've blogged about organizing, in the "household" sense of the term as opposed to the "union" sense of the term, before.
I look back on that post with infinite pity. How little I knew! How little I understood!
Not about priorities, which was my point in that post. But about how a household works. Ladies and gentlemen, I was ignorant, the product of a benignly chaotic household with no domestic order. I did not grasp that there was such a thing as domestic order. If you had used those words with me, I would have misunderstood you and not even known it.
No longer.
In keeping with the collapse of major areas of my personality in the past few months--I'd be open to a new religion right about now if I hadn't already done the following--I bought and am reading Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts.
"Home Comforts," as you may know, is the one where the author tells you how to fold your wash rag after you do the dishes.
Most reviewers treated Mendelson as being somewhat crazy for going into that kind of detail. They could not have missed the point any further if they'd gone to Pluto. "Home Comforts" is about how a home functions. Everything flows from that. The washrag instructions are like a ballet master correcting a dancer's finger placement.
That sense of coherence, of everything being the logical extension of a core principle, is what's missing in much physical home life today. In short, "housekeeping" is what's missing.
Mendelson strikes a mighty and long-overdue blow against the desperate proliferation of decor, luxury conveniences and crafts in place of "housekeeping," which is what people think they're doing with all that stuff but they're not.
The mission of "Home Comforts" is to show the folks who buy oversized pillows and aggressive closet storage systems what it is they're actually looking for.
Well, no, they know that. They're looking for order.
What Mendelson does is show them where order truly lies.
For the next several days, that is what we are going to discuss. A lot of it is going to be a comparison of housekeeping to today's trend of "organizing," which was all I knew before I read Mendelson. It seems to me that housekeeping and organizing are natural opposites and even enemies, and I wanted to explore their differences.
More tomorrow.
