August 26, 2018 -  Not as I do, but as I say

         I was astonished at the same time I was amused by the Editor in Chief’s comments in the September 2018 Better Homes and Gardens magazine in his Editor’s Letter entitled “REAL LIFE”.

         Stephen Orr actually admitted that when you walk into his home it is not photo-worthy.  He tells the readers he has bargain curtain panels tacked up – “yes, they are literally hung up with tacks” in his living room.  He admits his storm doors stick or “fly open in the slightest breeze when they aren’t secured by wire”.

         Wire?  How about upgrading that to a latch and hook like we had to when the wind took our storm door and slammed it the day we moved into our new home.

Our sad storm door at the back of the house, still for some unknown reason, is often caught by the wind and it whams and bams against the railing in a “heart-beat” [a phrase I picked up when we lived in Delaware].  

In the twenty years we have lived here, we have suffered with that door. It is on my fix-it list, but it is the back entrance, and we have been putting up with it. [I fear that when we do have a new door installed, it will last only a few days before the wind takes that and busts it up, too.]

Then, Orr reports a female colleague said to him, “Isn’t it amazing what you learn to live with around the house?”

It is true, not everyone’s house is picture perfect every minute of the day.  When you are in the middle of cooking . . . you’ve utensils and pots and pans and dishes to be washed.  When you are having your coffee. . . the newspaper is littered between one reader and the next.  When you bring in groceries, it takes a little bit to put them all away.  And, then, there is the constant laundry, beds stripped and waiting to be made and laundry to be switched from washer to dryer to fold and put away.

I’ve never visited anyone’s home where every room and nook and cranny was “picture-perfect” and ready for a photo shoot, including my own.

It’s finally nice, to know I belong to a distinguished club.  That club of knowing what needs to be fixed and not being able to get all my fix-it projects done yet. Knowing that not every room has to be picture perfect; knowing that I, as well as possibly the majority of the world, “learn to live” with a bit of things to be fixed or painted or some daily clutter or a two-week layer of dust and three loads of laundry waiting on me as “I live life”.

So, do take the advice Orr suggests when you are perusing a home and garden magazine or architectural design magazine:

Come away with ideas, inspiration, and appreciation that you are living the real life and most of us do have items on the to-do list or fix-it list we haven’t gotten around to yet. 

It’s okay. We are real people with real lives.