House beautiful, and not

We have had two open houses now, two to go before the auction. We spend Sundays cleaning the nearly perfect house, making it actually perfect. We pull freshly-baked cookies out of the oven just as the realtor puts up the open house sign, and the sun sparkles through polished windows and onto beautifully dog-hair-free floors. As I was leaving this weekend to allow the strangers to wander through my house and open up my closet doors, one woman stood in the lounge and asked, breathlessly, “How can you BEAR to leave this place.” I looked back through the open wall of windows, the irises in their vase, the perfectly primped and plumped house and told her honestly, “I don’t know!”

This clean and perfect house fills me with joy. I wander from room to room, seeing only beautiful things, only the grace of empty surfaces with a paua shell here or a vase of flowers there. The lovely clean spareness inside lets the views of the outside in, the green canopy of the back deck through sparkling sunshine, the tropical garden of the front.

These breathless visitors to this house—in whose numbers I occasionally count myself on these dreamy still mornings—don’t see what goes on back stage. They don’t know about the twelve boxes of books lugged to the other house in order to give the bookshelves an airy feel. They don’t know about the cartons of toys and dress up clothes and, of course, just regular old junk that is safely boxed up and out of sight. And they don’t see the real preparations before the curtain goes up on open house days.

A typical Sunday afternoon, pre open house, has me barking orders at the children, putting away any evidence that humans occupy this space. I thought steam would come out of my ears this Sunday as Aidan blew his hot breath on the freshly-cleaned window and then wrote his name in the fog. When I find Naomi’s clothes in a heap in a soggy post-bath bathroom, I find myself practicing my deep breathing before calling her name, shrewlike, and saying “What do you think I don’t like about this picture!”

So each time I’m lost in the reverie of wondering, “Why don’t we live like this all the time? It’s so beautiful!” I realise, I do NOT want to spend my life worried about shoes left out or a book left carelessly next to a cup of tea. I have long admired those who keep their houses spotless (you know who those people are) and thought with some gentle envy about the gifts which allow this magic to take place. But it turns out not to be a gift so much as just hard hard work and a shift in priorities. And I can do it, and I can be delighted about the results of it. And, from this perch, I can say I do NOT want to live this way. Perhaps I’ll work harder not to clutter the surfaces, perhaps I’ll put more of my junk in a box with a lid—or better still, acquire less junk in the first place. But I am too round and three-dimensional to live between the pages of a magazine. And so I’ll keep the set clean while the curtain is up, and then I’ll look for a future that is somewhere between the line we’ve struck during this on-the-market period and the life I usually live.

(of course, to complete the lemonjuice-in-the-papercut theme of the day, here's a video tour of the new house. think it's ready for a magazine??)