The real enjoyment of home comes when for the first time you are taking
a week off.
"Are you going to Atlantic City?" asks Jones.
You curl your lip in a sneer and tilt your nose and snort, and make
yourself superior.
"Atlantic City! Do I look easy? Atlantic City, boardwalk, red hot sun,
skinny bathers, flies in the dining-room, at $7 a day? Not on your life!
I'm going to stay home and take the rest cure--that's me! I'm going to
sleep late, eat four meals a day, spade my garden when I feel like it
and enjoy life right. I'm going to take a shower bath every thirty-six
minutes and no company--not a blooming visitor--the whole week. What I
want is absolute rest."
Jones listens, but with an air of one who is wise.
That was my experience.
I was getting fagged, brain-weary and nervous from a terrific strain of
making an appearance at work. The bluff went over and the powers that be
told me to go away and cut out the telephone. So out to That House I
Bought forthwith hied me--instanter removed. To drop the load, to forget
the worries, to submerge the business ego in a week of solid rest! I
was getting near to Heaven.
The first morning I awoke with a start, leaped out of bed, shed my
pajamas and grabbed for the things on the chair. I was dressed and
halfway down stairs before I realized that it was off duty for mine. O
joy! I got THE SUN from the porch and read the leading locals and saw
half a dozen stories sticking out between the lines. The telephone was
handy; I'd call up the office and suggest--whoa! The telephone had been
cut out.
"Good!" I exclaimed internally. "I'll have late breakfast and sleep a
couple of hours."
My wife came down.
"While I'm getting breakfast," she said, "suppose you turn the hose on
the porch, and just kind of dust it off with this broom. The girl won't
come until next week, and you know I'm a sick woman."
I squirted the hose and dusted. Scrubbery is one of my short talents.
When the sun dried it off, the porch was streaked from end to end, and I
had to do it over with my wife supervising.
"It is so sweet for us to be together in our nice new home," she said,
as I dutifully toted dishes to the kitchen. "You wipe while I wash them,
and then you can take a hammer and some tacks and fix these old chairs
for the kitchen. When you get that done you can put up some shelves for
me in the fruit pantry, and why don't you arrange your books to-day?
They're in all sorts of places. There are lots of sticks and stones
around the yard. Suppose you pick them up and mow the lawn. Oh, I know
what you can do! You can level up all these little gullies where the
rain has cut up the loose dirt in the back yard. Isn't it just too dear
for anything for us to have a whole week of fun fixing up around the
house? I think after you get through with the yard you can----"
And so on and so on, to the end of the chapter!
Some people think cleaning up around a new house is pie for papa, but
it isn't. There is none of that glamour you read about in "The Delights
of Home" articles, and it isn't a thing on earth but a case of chuck the
cuffs and collars and yield your soul to perspiration and persistence.
First, when you start to follow the carpenter into nooks and corners of
the cellar and little hiding places in the top floor, you find that he
has invented innumerable kinds of leavings, deftly tucked here and there
where nobody but a second-sight man would ever figure on locating them.
You begin to pick up and after you've stooped about two thousand times
you remember the picture in the liver medicine ad., where the man
stands with his hands on the small of his back, looking unhappy and
pessimistic.
And it isn't only picking up, but it's cleaning out. What to do with the
stuff bothers you. It's a cinch to burn the shavings and little pieces
of wood and that kind of material, but you've got to deal again with
bits of putty and glass and bent nails and tacks and other unburnable
debris, and you hate to throw them into the bathtub because of the
plumbing. You finally throw them out the window.
Later you realize that you threw them out unwisely. That's when you
start to work on your lawn and side yard, and every time you stick in
the trowel where you are setting out plants you fetch up a quart of
junk. The astonishing lot of garbage they used to make the ground you
stand on is bad enough, but with the things you've thrown out added to
it the situation is exasperating.
You run your lawn mower over a nail, pick it up, and then wonder why
providence ever let you get away from an early death, for sheer
imbecility. It was the nail you picked up in the third floor and didn't
know how to dispose of it. Pulling up a little bit of ground with your
hands, to make a place for some dwarf nasturtium, you cut your finger
with the piece of glass you threw out the side window. It's vexing. What
to do with this wreckage a second time puzzles you, and you finally
throw it over into the next lot. That's the time you find that your
neighbor was watching you from his windows, and--it's not easy to be
nice to people who throw their refuse over the lot line, is it?
But the worst of all this cleaning-up business is that your wife bosses
the job.
Somehow or other, the man who loves his wife still draws the line at
matrimonial dictatorship, even in so small a thing as picking up after
the carpenter. Neither you nor your wife intended to let it go that
far, and she really doesn't intend to go home to her mother, nor do you
really intend to drown your domestic griefs in drink. But with some
provocations man gets peevish and woman irritable.
The night before it had rained. Our back yard was soaked to the marrow,
if a yard has a marrow. We had a wire stretched to mark our lot line and
keep people off the grass seed and the garden. On the heels of the rain
came one of the company drivers, took down the wire with deliberation
and criminal purpose, and drove two goldarned mules and a wagon right
through that yard, cutting ruts six inches deep and scattering parsnips,
parsley, beans, peas, and lettuce all over the place. In a new
development you have to stay at home twenty-four hours a day and yell at
such people, or they'll have you rutted out of your possession.
It was pitiful to see those great ruts when we had worked so hard, and
the torn-up garden with its sprouts here and there showing what it might
have been. But it was more pitiful to see me walking around with a
pocketful of manslaughter, looking for the driver who did it. Every
driver on the place admitted that he didn't do it; so I came to the
conclusion that it couldn't have been done at all. I was having
delusions. The ruts and ruined gardens were figments of a disordered
imagination.
Oh, well, what's the use?
I got the rake, shovel, spade, hoe, hand cultivator, lawn mower, trowel,
and a couple of things you lift young plants with and assembled myself
on the lawn to put in a good day's work. With the rake I started to rake
off the side yard, and got about halfway through when I discovered that
the lawn needed mowing. Halfway through with the mowing job my eye
spotted certain thick spots of weeds, and so I started weeding. Halfway
through with that I stopped to pick up sticks and stones and throw them,
as usual, over my neighbor's lot. Then it was this thing and that thing,
never finishing anything, until finally I chucked all things and started
something new.
That's the way with enthusiasts. For finishing a job, give me the
plodder whose imagination is subordinate to his hoe. You see, he is a
one-idea man, and the idea may not be his own; but the fellow with the
genius for starting things is very seldom there at the finish. He dreams
large and turns the details over to more successful men.
This new thing I started concerns the front plot of garden around the
porch. It was a disorganized thing as it stood. I cut out a ditch in
front of it, piled all the dirt back against the house and toted baskets
of hard stones from a neighboring lot. These I leaned against the sides
of the ditch and hammered them in, or cut out the earth and set, making
a stone wall that would retain the earth, hold a certain amount of water
for irrigation and at the same time be ornamental. It took two hours to
make as many yards of this stuff, and several friends called attention
to the trouble I was taking for no necessary purpose. Well, that may be
so--and probably is--but it is so stupid to be always doing the
necessary things, living on the obvious, plugging along on the course of
existence that is common to all.