Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Slaying The Beast

I think the need to fight and conquer is tattooed into the chromosomes of every human being who ever lived. We all have our own monsters and demons, our own beasts to fight and kill. The type of beast is different for everyone, but when you look at the things that entertain us, they are generally about good guys and bad guys and the destruction of the monster by the hero. Whether the hero is a cop fighting the mob or a 12-year-old boy wizard battling the embodiment of snaky nastiness, it's always the little guy going into battle against a larger, seemingly unstoppable force. But The Beast doesn't have to be a single big monster, it can also be lots and lots of little ones.

We rescued two kittens back in August of last year. They brought with them fleas to my home. We have never had fleas, and were completely unprepared to deal with them. All the flea powder and sprays and baths in the world has not rid us of this plague. And it is like a plague. The cats are miserable and one is ill thanks to a serious and heretofore unknown allergy to fleas. We've been fighting for a year, and have had no success.
Like the villagers in an old fantasy story, we must call in a knight errant to wield his sword and spear against our Beast for us. In the real world, this would be the Terminex man with his special sprays and traps. Huzzah and all will be well, for this hero is a well-known and much loved slayer of Beasts! Highly recommended to us and will not demand an outrageous payment for his services.

Unlike the fantasy story, however, we had another Beast which must be slain before the knight could reach us, this one was more like the werewolf legend. Someone in the village was a danger, and must be rooted out before the knight would come. In our case, the werewolf is the fact that there are three incredibly messy people living in my house. None of us cleaned well or often. My house was split between Hoarding levels 2 and 3 according to the NSGCD's literature.

We recognized our problems long ago, and were trying to fix them. I don't have hoarding issues, but the other two do. I'm just messy. But it sort of amounted to the same thing. Last week, we went into battle The Beast. I have to say I think this one was worse than the fleas. The fleas are external, the dragon that swooped out of the sky one day. It's not our fault. We were trying to do a good thing and save two kittens' lives.
The mess, however, the werewolf IS our fault. The gypsies cursed us after we refused to let them take shelter in our town, and we will suffer for it. Routing out the werewolf, werewolves, means the death of people you care about. It means that someone you love--like, at least--is going to die. Because they are the werewolf.
To bring that out of metaphor, cleaning and decluttering means taking time away from things we want to do to get rid of things we want to keep. How many college textbooks do I need? I'm not going to college anymore. How many romance novels can BB (hubby's sister) really read? How many models can Teddy (hubby) reasonably display? Do I need a collection of 40 rubber ducks? Does Teddy need his childhood toys? Does BB have to have six books on knitting? If you had asked us all a year ago, we would have said "yes." The trade-off didn't seem so bad. People couldn't come over. So what? We can always go out, or to their house. So what if it smells? Give it a half-hour and you won't notice it.
Last night, we won our battle. For now, at least. Last night, I cooked dinner on a clean stove while BB set a clean table with clean dishes and Teddy vacuumed an otherwise-spotless craft room. After we finished dinner, eaten together at a real table and served with fresh clean dishes pulled from neat stacks in a clean cupboard, I unloaded the dishwasher's last load while BB cleared the table and Teddy cleaned the cat litter. Then BB loaded the dishwasher while I washed down the counters and stove. Teddy carried the garbage to the curb.
Then, we sat down together in our living room which was completely devoid of piles of trash, old mail piled on the coffee table, and dishes piled on tray tables to watch our latest NetFlix disc (Leverage Season 1 Disc 3, if you're curious). Teddy snuggled with one of the cats, BB pulled out her crochet and I got a couple more rows done on my knitting project.
When we decided to shut down around 11, we girls packed away our crafts, and Teddy straightened the sofa cushions he'd mussed. I carried the glasses we'd drunk from into the kitchen, dumped and rinsed them. BB put the crafting basket in its new home, and Teddy set the alarm.
Before I curled up to sleep with Teddy that night in a made bed that didn't have to cleared off before we got into it, that had clean sheets and pillowcases on the pillows, I put my clothes in a hamper. I didn't trip on anything on my way into bed. And when had to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I didn't stub my toe on a camera bag like I did last month, didn't trip on my dirty clothes, and didn't have to step over a pile of books by the bed. I just walked in the dark without fearing for my toes.

Like any good horror story, we don't know if the Beast is really, truly dead. Maybe we'll never know. But the important thing is that we know what it looks like now, and we know we can fight it. We know that, at the end of the day, we can win because we are stronger than The Beast.

And that's all that matters.

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