Golden Dreams of Cozy Domesticity

We made it to Friday! Rejoicing abounds. I have so many many things to do this weekend so as not to be counted as a total failure in the eyes of all mankind. Every few minutes my two little girls ask if it is Christmas. Like in the intervening three minutes since they last asked, maybe seven days passed quickly by and Santa came. Every time I say, “NO”. Then they ask, “When is tomorrow?” Age six is supposed to be the moment, as far as I can remember, when the passing of time seems to make some kind of impression on the mind, but so far for us, Nothing.

Anyway, I am going to put aside the roiling of this week’s blogging–what is the nature of God, and what is love, and the whole Wheaton thing, and turn my attention this morning, most briefly, to this article about Coziness, and how important Domesticity is for human flourishing. Matt sent it to me because the first few lines are all about how people in Norway don’t hate winter, they embrace and enjoy it. He is trying to forestall the inevitable depression that will fall over me like a heavy, suffocating blanket as I look out at the Gray of Binghamton over the next many months. The remedy, the way to avoid this terrible trial, as far as the author is concerned, is to nurture the Scandinavian concept of coziness, of domesticity, of socks and hot cocoa and relationships strengthened around the shared core experience of a meal cooked together and time spent on what really matters.

Great lumps of sarcasm rose up in my throat as I read the article. And let me just say, this rant is in no way going to represent all my feelings on the subject of homemaking. I have been sitting for some many days on some pointed thoughts that coagulated themselves, like a badly set jello, as I toiled through RHE’s chapter on homemaking. Apparently scripture teaches that the woman must keep the home while the man sits in the gate and so for a month, Ms. Evans did all the housework without any help at all from her husband, because of the bible. And of course it was not pleasant or fulfilling at all, except for one glorious moment at the end of the chapter when she discovered that the real meaning of home making is that all the work culminates in the preciousness of dancing around the wrecked and destroyed kitchen after a failed dinner with little children who don’t care what the food tastes like.

Honestly, my heart went out to Ms. Evans. Except for the mangling of the biblical text, the careful construction of a delicate straw lady that can be easily blown down with one tired breath, she put her finger on the nub of the issue. Keeping house is kind of a…..what’s the word I’m looking for? There is the actual work, and there are all your feelings about the work, and there are all of everybody else’s feelings and expectations about the work, and then there, looming over the horizon, are God’s Commands. Keeping house, making a home is a terribly tricky business.

But apparently, according to the author of this article, it wasn’t always so. Apparently, in the distant, golden hued past, men and women worked together to eek out their meager existences in the home and on the farm. And they loved it. They thought it was wonderful. They loved being together doing the home and farm arts. That must be why, as soon as there was the possibility of having cash to buy some of the stuff they had heretofore toiled over by hand, they totally rejected that way and stayed happily on their farms. Oh wait, I’m misremembering. They Didn’t! The men promptly went to work, and some of the women too, and they hired servants, if they could, and sent the children to school. I wonder why they did that? If they’d been Norwegian they wouldn’t have, I bet, because the Norwegians understand, deep in their souls, that family is more important to the heart than money. When you go to a Scandinavian home, for dinner, they will give you a pair of socks to wear. Just as an aside, this never happened to me, on my occasional visits to Norway, Sweden and Denmark. I’m not saying the author is lying. I’m just saying, I was never given the opportunity to wear handmade socks, which makes me feel incredibly sad.

No, but really, the author must be right. Keeping house is essential. Someone has to do it. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed darkly hinted, towards the end of the piece, that the men and women should always be home together, keeping cozy, keeping the priority of family always in view. I suppose all men everywhere should start home businesses so that they can be home and the women can be home and Christian sanity can be restored to the west.

This to me seems, first of all, like not a realistic possibility, and second of all, like the underlying problem of life just being hard not being accounted for. Human beings have to eat and wear clothes and pay for essentials like heat and the Internet. Children have to learn to read and write and not be horrible. It is true, that when both the man and the woman have to work full time, or chose to, some areas life have to be quickly managed and maybe even outsourced. If you have both been at the office and the children have been at school, you need a quick supper and that means you would not be making bone broth from scratch and grinding the flour to make the bread. You’ll be tossing some stuff in a frying pan that’s been pre-chopped while screaming at the kids to do their homework. But it doesn’t follow that the conversation over the bone broth is more familial than the one over the stir fry. The family may be exhausted and frazzled either way.

Which the author does address. Building coziness takes time and energy. We try to buy it on the cheap by consuming stuff rather than investing in people through the simplicity of managing the home. But I think that’s kind of a false dichotomy. Sure, we are a throw away culture. None of us have the same microwave over the course of our whole lives. Trips to the Salvation Army have to be a regular part of life as stuff moves in and out of the household. I guess I don’t buy it that that’s the sign of our degeneration. I grew up in a culture where it was hard to buy stuff but everybody wanted to. Given the chance, my entire remote village would have chucked everything to come live in America and just own Stuff. The domestic arts of cutting your firewood every day, hauling your water out of the well, harvesting and pounding grain, having your infants die of malaria held no heavy sway so that the choice to pitch them for an easier way wouldn’t have immediately been grasped.

But maybe he means not that, but rather my richer and more upper class experience, one that I carry on with now. See, being western, and the exchange rate being what it was, we were able to pay someone to scrub our laundry and hang it out to dry, and pay someone to bring in the water from the well. And that person, cash in hand, was able to buy a tin roof and send some children away to school. In that remote and gracious life, I learned to cook from scratch. I learned to dismember whole chickens, and make pancakes without bisquick, and bread without a mixer, and everything by candlelight. I am able, just as the next lady, to draw up my water from the well, heat it on the stove, carry it across the house to the bathroom, and bathe from a large metal wash tub, the flickering light of two candles, one other either side of the Botticelli Calendar, pushing back the dark African night. The calendar had been carried carefully all the way from Italy, or maybe America, which took a lot of work. But, you know, it meant going to those places.

Now I am the keeper of my home and knowing how to cook and do laundry has been awfully useful. And, to my total and complete happiness, my husband’s commute is 28 and one half seconds. So he is often at home. And every day we gather around our cozy family table for a home cooked lunch. Yesterday I boiled an entire ham in Coca Cola and peeled a whole bag of potatoes, by hand, and baked them in a golden dream of béchamel and cheese. I roasted a tray of vegetables and I laid it all out and it was gorgeous. But guess what, the children argued. I was overcome by grief at one point, and actually wept into my tumblerful of wine, and Matt had to respond to an email and a phone call, because of his, you know, job that pays for the food, and the doorbell rang. I guess the author would say that even in the trials, we are spending time together and that will pay off in the long run. And I believe him. But if I never had to descend into Sheol but could pay someone to do my laundry, and if I went out to dinner every single day, and if I could afford to buy my garlic already cut, I don’t think I would be unhappier. And the children wouldn’t turn out to be godless heathen. We could still work out a common life and care for the vagaries of the heart.

And now I will arise and get in a car I did not assemble myself and drive to another part of town to consume some stuff because it’s almost Christmas.