MEEKER | All of a sudden, spring is everywhere. It’s in the buds on the trees and the anthills popping up along the street. It’s in the first bright green shoots of soft baby grass, the birdsong in the air and and my blindingly white Irish legs that haven’t seen sunshine since last September. (Although they only get slightly less blinding in the summer time.)
Spring is also all over my house. Having four kids, you learn to live with an ungodly amount of messiness and lower your expectations accordingly or you’ll go insane, but when the temperature rises enough for them to be outside in the backyard doing who-knows-what for hours on end, the mess intensifies. Mud. Rocks. Dirt. Sticks! More mud. More rocks. More sticks. On my kitchen floor. In my dishwasher (no joke). All over everything and everyone.
I’ve seriously considered calling it quits on the whole house cleaning thing during these months, but as with most things, there’s a life lesson buried in the disaster that is my house. As I was sweeping up yet another ridiculously large pile of dirt, Legos, socks (why, children, why?) and other miscellany, it got me thinking about how incredibly messy change is. As humans, we crave that drab to fab, “ta-dah!” moment, but we often forget about all the demolition and reconstruction that has to occur for that to happen.
As we jump headlong into the sunshine of summer, let’s consider the areas of our lives that are still in change-mode, and adjust expectations accordingly. “Embrace the glorious mess that you are,” author Elizabeth Gilbert says.
As the saying goes, the road to success is never a straight line.
And apparently the road to a clean house is a roundabout with no exit. Send help.
By Caitlin Walker | [email protected]
