How to Be "Clean"

The thing that struck me most in the Tolkein article was the section about how man regulates nature instead of letting it be. The story about how German bombers were told to bomb anything in a straight line reminded me of how I used to get in trouble as a kid for leaving my toys out. I wish I had been able to come up with an excuse like "Well, y'know, Mom... Nature isn't neat and put away. Do you want me to be...unnatural?" Of course, I probably would've been spanked for my mouth, but it's cool to think about anyways.

Keeping things neat and clean and orderly is one of those things that was drilled into me as a child. While this practice corresponds directly with Tolkein's assessment of American lifestyle and is widely considered to be a good thing, I believe it to be a type of folklore. Everyone has their own stories about what their homes, or homes of their relatives, looked like when they were growing up. These influences are many and varied. We see what our own homes look like and subconsciously compare it to those of our friends and relatives, and form our own conclusions about what cleanliness is, and what level of cleanliness we would like our homes to have. We learn by example, and we teach these values to our children on a personal level.

For me, this chiefly meant the combination of my own very busy and very crowded household with those of my grandmother and late great-grandmother. Their homes were always immaculate: not a speck of dust in sight, not a pillow out of place, perfectly parallel vacuum lines on the carpet. My own was never that...unblemished, but my mother tried her best to teach us what a house SHOULD look like, as she had been taught. Even though the common areas of the house where almost never that clean, we were instructed in how to keep our rooms clean, and they were expected to stay that way. These lessons were not only family folklore, but they influenced our view of cleanliness in the rest of the world as well.