Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

renting a house

How cleaning the porch helps me love more

I swept the porch this week.

I know: stop the presses. Alert the local media. Breaking news, right here.

But my son wanted to play outside and I was tired of the clutter and feeling like I was just sitting around recovering from stressful days or waiting for stressful days to happen, so I took charge of the day and my attitude and decided it was past time to clean.

For a few months, our porch has been accumulating the toys we want to give away. Getting them out of the house was a first step. But they couldn’t live on the porch forever. So, I moved them to the yard, took some pictures, posted to Facebook and hoped I’d have a some takers before needing to haul the treasures to a thrift store.

In the meantime, I moved everything on the porch away from the house and I took a broom to the dirt that had also piled up. And I swept away the grime. I rearranged the furniture. I rounded up the toys we were keeping and tried to contain them in a bin. I trashed the garbage and set a boundary: no more stick piles on the porch.

As I cleaned, our son reminded me of the springtime cleaning we did, wiping the grit off the windows so we could throw them open and feel the breeze after a stuffy winter.

These are not earth-shattering activities by any means, but they represent a shift in my thinking.

See, we don’t own this home. We’re just renting it. And even though my continues to wander to the houses for sale in our neighborhood, my husband reminds me that we need to settle in to this house. For real. We’ve been here a year and we still have piles of things that need to be trashed or sorted or dealt with. Stuff that has followed us through three moves in two states and seven years of marriage.

And though we’ve never owned a home, this space is the first one we’ve wanted to take care of like it is ours. I’ve told you how my husband likes to take care of the yard. He doesn’t have to. We don’t have to. But we want to. (And if we live here long enough, I might actually get around to planting flowers or gardening.)

It’s no secret that I’ve struggled to be content lately. Even with the summer of fun behind us and a fulfilling first year in our new community, I am still floundering a bit, wondering what’s next, what we’re doing here, and if it’s ever going to change.

In those times, it’s easy to find fault. With our community. With our house. With my family. With me.

So that sweeping of the porch, it became a sort of holy moment. As the dirt swirled at my feet and floated off the porch, it was like my mind was clearing out the cobwebs, too.

Anne Lamott said this and when I read it this week, I knew exactly what she meant:

“My only hope was to plug into something bigger than my pulsing mind, to flail around outside rather than within me. God can’t clean the house of you when you’re still in it.” (Grace, Eventually, 235)

The more I cared for the physical space we occupied, the more I cared about it.

When I keep it clean and tidy, when I seek to improve our living space, leaving it better than we found it, something happens in my heart and I love it more. The faults are less and I am more at peace with the way things are.

And just as my love for our home increases with care, so does my love for people.

It is easy to find fault with people when I am not caring for them. It is easy to convince myself they are not worth my time, that I can find other people better suited to my life.

BUT.

When I care for and love and serve these same people, I find I love them more. (I think our pastor said something similar to this in his sermon last week. I’ll have to re-listen. I was a little preoccupied.)

I could choose to not care about our house because we’re just renting it. But isn’t everything in life temporary? Aren’t we technically just leasing our lives, our relationships, our talents and gifts and time from the God who gave them to us?

If my throwaway attitude transferred to all of those areas, then I’d be wholly unsatisfied with my life all the time.

When I care for my relationships, I care more about the people in my life, even when they aren’t perfect.

When I’m purposeful with my time, I spend it better.

When I exercise my talents and gifts, when I cultivate them and use them in ways that serve others, I’m more satisfied with my place in the world and less concerned with the gifts other people have that I don’t.

All I did was sweep the porch.

But it was so much more than that.

I cleaned out my heart, too.

How to rid your house of mice {in 99 easy steps}

  1. Notice mouse droppings in the pantry of the old farmhouse you’ve just moved into.
  2. Convince yourself that it’s probably not recent because no one has lived here for a while.
  3. Accidentally drop a large piece of pizza between the fridge and stove.
  4. Forget to clean it up.
  5. Ask husband if he cleaned up the pizza the next morning when you notice that it is gone.
  6. Conclude that you definitely have a mouse in the house.
  7. Freak out.
  8. Ask friends what they recommend for traps.
  9. Buy traps.
  10. Place one glue trap between the fridge and stove to catch the mouse on its path from the pantry to the counters.
  11. Wait. Overnight, if possible.
  12. Avoid looking at the area the next morning when you wake up.
  13. When children insist the trap is moving, call husband out of bed to dispose of mouse and trap.
  14. Breathe a sigh of relief and continue to enjoy your new home.
  15. Forget about mice for months.
  16. While using the step stool to put away spare sheets in the hall closet, decide to finally clean up all the accumulated plastic bags on the floor of the pantry so you can return the step stool to its rightful place.
  17. Notice mouse droppings.
  18. Convince yourself that those are leftover mouse droppings from the last mouse because you aren’t a terribly thorough cleaner and you can’t remember how well you cleaned the pantry anyway.
  19. Collect plastic bags to take to recycling.
  20. Jump and scream when you move plastic bags and a little mouse scurries across the pantry and disappears into the wall.
  21. Run to the bedroom and jump on the bed where your 4-year-old retreated when he heard you scream.
  22. Take deep breaths.
  23. Convince yourself you can finish the clean-up job without screaming.
  24. Don gloves and gingerly pick up plastic bags until you can see the floor again.
  25. Move glue trap to the spot where you saw the mouse disappear.
  26. Recycle plastic bags at the grocery store.
  27. Tell husband about the mouse.
  28. Forget mice exist.
  29. Get on with life.
  30. On an unsuspecting day when you’re sitting at the computer and the children are running through the house, scream as you see a grey blob scurrying across the kitchen floor right toward you.
  31. Freeze.
  32. Run into the bedroom and jump on the bed with the kids while hubby is getting ready for work.
  33. Point and shriek when you see the rodent peeking out from behind a chair in the bedroom.
  34. Watch in horror and awe as your husband tries to trap the mouse in the hall closet.
  35. Scream again when the mouse escapes into the kids’ bedroom.
  36. Wonder out loud if maybe it’s time to move again.
  37. Take husband to work.
  38. Eat lunch when you get home.
  39. Let kids play outside so you can wash the dishes that piled up from the day before when you were sick.
  40. Remove from the kitchen the cardboard boxes for recycling and boxes of donations to take to Goodwill.
  41. Go back outside and play (which actually means ignoring the mouse problem.)
  42. Decide to walk to the park and back, which will kill about 2 hours of your day.
  43. Have fun at the park.
  44. Invent errands to run when you get home from the park.
  45. Go shopping at Target for water bottles and the grocery store for canned pizza dough because you wanted to make homemade dough but the kids wouldn’t leave your side.
  46. Attempt to roll out canned pizza dough.
  47. Curse and yell at the pizza dough that will not stretch correctly.
  48. Decide to go out for dinner.
  49. Eat at CiCi’s pizza.
  50. Go to another park.
  51. Return home for the fastest bath times in human history.
  52. Go to Chick-fil-a early for indoor play time before hubby gets off work.
  53. Tell hubby about your terrible horrible no good very bad day that also had some good points.
  54. Let the 6-year-old girl call her grandpa to talk about why she’s scared of the mouse.
  55. Sing children to sleep.
  56. Wear slippers to bed.
  57. Go to church the next morning because it’s Sunday and it’s the best place to be.
  58. Talk about your mouse problem and how it’s scaring the children (just the children, of course).
  59. Come home from church refreshed.
  60. Eat lunch.
  61. Enjoy family nap time.
  62. Pretend the mouse has vanished.
  63. See mouse scamper through the kitchen the next morning while everyone else is sleeping.
  64. Wake sleeping husband and convince him to put traps on the path.
  65. Send your daughter to school the next day with hope that the mouse will be gone by the time she’s home.
  66. Send hubby and son to Lowe’s for manly purchases.
  67. Clean parts of kitchen with fear and trepidation while they are gone.
  68. Convince yourself mouse is nothing to be afraid of.
  69. Let husband and son back in the house as husband points out the mouse scurrying across the kitchen.
  70. Leap onto the bench at the counter/peninsula while husband resumes attempt to catch the mouse.
  71. Watch him squeeze himself into the pantry while trying to trap the mouse.
  72. Sigh with dread as mouse disappears. Again.
  73. Spend the rest of the day battling big emotions and crying.
  74. Lie down for a few minutes before picking the girl up from the bus.
  75. Work together as a family to cook a delicious dinner.
  76. Put the kids to bed.
  77. Bait a trap with peanut butter.
  78. Discover mouse droppings in a place that makes you want to puke.
  79. Watch Doctor Who to take your mind off things.
  80. Hear sounds from the kitchen.
  81. Send husband to investigate.
  82. Breathe easier when he tells you he has caught and disposed of a mouse.
  83. Sleep soundly that night, without slippers on.
  84. Tell kids the good news the next morning.
  85. Put daughter on the bus.
  86. See mouse scurrying through the kitchen as you and son prepare to leave for playdate.
  87. Tell husband to bait another trap, even if it means the mouse will be your problem later in the day while he’s at work.
  88. Hear sounds in kitchen before you and son leave.
  89. Tell hubby that mouse may already be caught.
  90. Leave for playdate and enjoy time outside of the house.
  91. Return from playdate to learn that second mouse has been caught and disposed of.
  92. Spend next two days tiptoeing around your house, jumping at slight movements and shadows, ears alert to any kind of noise, unconvinced that mouse problem is over.
  93. Tell Facebook friends you need prayer because you are going crazy over this.
  94. Get on with kitchen/laundry chores because it can’t wait.
  95. Report mouse problem to landlord.
  96. Wait for landlord’s call.
  97. Consider getting a cat against landlord’s policy.
  98. Write longest how-to list on the face of the earth.
  99. Leave readers hanging in suspense because you really don’t know how this is all going to turn out.