My friend Maria in Sag Harbor, who keeps a mighty tidy house — all snug and warm, with every polished surface wiped clean of crumbs, the linens ironed and folded with Germanic regimentation, and the fireplace hearth impeccable — told me once that it’s important to keep your front door looking shipshape, because it’s the face you turn to the world. No second chance for a first impression and all that. Many of my best ideas for housekeeping and household spiffiness came directly from Maria: to spread a tablecloth for tea; to keep cooking matches in a box affixed to the wall by the stove; to use British pub towels with the names of British booze brands (Adnams Southwold Ales, Murphy’s Irish Stout) on a breakfast tray, beneath the plate.
I was reminded of this excellent advice about the front door as I ran out mine this morning and noted the majestic trail of balsam-fir needles running like a green river down the steps and in a weaving course toward the backside of the barn. No, but, really, you’d be amazed by the volume of green pine needles that fell — as if poured from a pail — from our Christmas tree as it was hastened from the house in the winter gloaming on Saturday evening, wrapped in a bedsheet like the victim of a very cozy holiday-themed murder mystery.
The snow had melted by Tuesday morning, leaving, somehow, some way, a perfectly symmetrical ice-skating rink along the brick walkway between the house and the lane: just the walkway frozen over like glass, while the grass on either side had re-emerged, mottled brown and muddy, as the thermometer inched up above 34 degrees Fahrenheit.
The front of our house is a disgrace. Two snow shovels as well as two large yard rakes have been left leaning against the sides of the white “vestibule” — an old-fashioned windbreak of wooden wainscoting that goes up each winter and comes down each spring, to keep the slush and tempest away from the door. No one (ahem) finished the raking of the front yard before the frost came, and instead of removing the rakes back to the barn (ahem), the shovels came out to be abandoned beside the rakes, and then no one shoveled the walk anyway. Hence the skating rink. In addition to this unsightly clutter, there is a blue plastic sled on the other side of the vestibule, just lying there, optimistically, in the sad, wet grass.
The other thing I keep forgetting — that is, not actually forgetting but neglecting — to do is bring another stack of firewood from the woodpile near the back garden gate and into said vestibule to dry out so it can be used in the fireplace, which, unlike Maria’s, is heaped with a shin-high pile of soft, gray ash. The woodpile has not been kept covered, lo these last few untidy years, and the wood is all wet, which means that the fire in the fireplace smokes and sizzles and refuses to burn.
My neighbors would like to add that, in addition to the shocking dishevelment of our privet hedge — which looks like Albert Einstein with his hair all crazy — there are various relics of childhood scattered around the grounds like evidence of an ancient civilization: one ugly, black lacrosse net about nine feet tall (charged by my daughter to my credit card while I was recovering from surgery at Southampton Hospital in the summer of 2023; no one plays lacrosse any longer); one low, long, safety-orange steel railing for practicing skateboard tricks upon (no one skateboards any longer); two bicycles left on their sides against the barn (why-oh? why-oh?), and a tall and very heavy hand-me-down basketball hoop stand that would certainly be put to good use by the teenagers if only we had managed to attach the heavy hoop-and-backstop part to the top of the heavy pole after hefting it here with great difficulty in the back of a pickup truck.
Our yard looks like a scene from “Hillbilly Elegy” (with apologies to Appalachia). We also have a boat and a defunct pickup truck. I’m not kidding. Lichen grows on the rooftop shingles, putty-green and lichen-gray. The privet hedge is a particular nettle in my side. That hedge has indeed now become so tall and overgrown that I stand before it and puzzle over the mathematical impossibility of trimming it down to size: To tame it would leave only bare, even more unsightly, stems and stalks, it seems to me; I need the assistance of a shrubbery genius. A good friend lent me a hedge trimmer many months ago, but the hedge trimmer remains silently waiting in the laundry room by the back door. The job requires two high ladders and at least two experienced landscapers. It’s beyond my capabilities.
Still, my thoughts turn, as the calendar page turns over to a new year, to the necessity of getting the house back together, in smaller increments. I bang my gavel and call the house to order. The interiors themselves are usually kept in a relatively decent state of passable cleanliness and almost decorum. If you are both myopic and astigmatic (and I am), and you squint very hard, certain corners of this house retain a “World of Interiors” charm and a whiff of shabby-gentry good taste. We do also have cracking lath-and-plaster here and there and kitchen fixtures that flicker overhead as if in warning of some impending danger, an air-raid signal. . . . But it’s the outside that has suffered the worst neglect over the last two tumultuous years of familial and financial rack but not-actually-ruin.
We are in good health. And, as I discovered when I was assisting two college girls with overpacked suitcases onto a westbound train at the Long Island Rail Road station on Sunday night, my arms remain almost mysteriously strong. We survive! We march onward! Indefatigable!
There will be no New Year’s resolutions, but I do intend to get a damp cloth and some bleach spray to wash the front door; I will sweep the vestibule, use one of the snow shovels to remove the pine-needle river, and bring in one or two armloads of logs, so we can sit by the fire in peace and relative tranquillity as we ponder the possibility of war with the NATO states, and wonder how we came to be sitting before the crackling logs on the wrong side of the global struggle between freedom and autocracy. Chin-chin!