Sometimes the house is too loud for me to get much work done.
Not loud in a literal sense. I can be home alone, sitting in my office, the animals all fast asleep, nothing stirring at all, and the house can still be deafening.
“Wash me!” comes the soft, somewhat muffled cry of the laundry in its hampers.
“I’m choking on all these hair tumbleweeds,” the floors join in. “It’s shedding season, you know!”
“We stink!” shout the litterboxes. “You can’t smell it from where you are but we do!”
“I’ve got an appointment with the trashman, I haven’t got all day,” notes the recycling bin.
Sometimes I just plug my ears, or perhaps turn on some music, metaphorically at least, and keep slogging away at whatever it is that I’ve got to do. Sometimes I have to. But the more I do that, the louder the house becomes. Eventually I can’t stand it any more — not the state of the house, not the awareness of its needs — and I give in.
I try to deal with it strategically. I’ve got work to do, after all, that has nothing to do with the laundry, the floors, the litterboxes, or anything of the kind. Getting up from the desk once an hour or so to spend fifteen minutes dealing with the laundry, or giving the bathroom fixtures a scrubdown, or something like that, is actually a pretty effective pattern. A lot gets done on both the house side and the office side, so long as I can handle the interruptions, the breaks, the fits-and-starts.
Today was one of those days where I just couldn’t manage it. Most of the time I can do the strategic housecleaning-as-breaktime-activity thing, parcel out the dusting and sweeping and dish-doing and whatnot across the day, and be just fine with it. Today I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t bear going back to the office when I knew the dusting had been done but the floors hadn’t yet been swept, couldn’t make my brain deal with history of marriage when it was yammering anxiously about the fact that the floors had been swept but not all the furnishings had been put back properly.
I’m sure it counts as displacement activity. I’m equally sure that some people will consider it fussy, or obsessive, and think of me as a tight-arse and a bore and wonder how on earth anyone could give enough of a damn about the state of her floors or her laundry or her dishes in the sink to be unable to concentrate on higher, more meaningful, more intellectual and highbrow and, well, just plain better things.
Well. The fact is that this is not just a place I come back to every night when I’m done working, it is where I work. The well-being of my house and my household is the well-being of the environment in which I write and, in no small way, my work as a writer as well. If you have the luxury of working in a place you don’t have to clean, whose rubbish bins you don’t have to empty and whose bathroom mirrors you are never called upon to polish, I can see why it might be hard to understand the intimate entanglements of the priorites here in my house, my home office, and my working life. Then again, as someone whose office is all of five feet from her bedroom and directly above her kitchen, I have a hard time imagining how you office workers can spend so much time and expend so much effort in a place from which you are so physically alienated and from whose workings you have — indeed, I get the impression many office workers can’t imagine not having — so much emotional and practical distance.
Some days the house is loud. Sometimes it wants attention. Maybe it’s irritable, or itchy. Sometimes it just has the blues. Part of my work is to listen to it, and give it what it needs as best I can, so that it will calm back down, quietly settling like the dog when he’s contented, and I can concentrate more fully on other things secure in the knowledge that the house is in good order, that unpleasantness does not await me, that all is well and quiet.
