Trading places easier said than done
by Kate Zimmerman for the North Shore News
WHEN pondering a vacation while sunk in the gloomy bowels of February, a house swap seems like the brightest idea possible.
One imagines it as an easy and frugal way to explore new territory. And by new territory, one doesn’t mean another person’s medicine cabinet.
I understand that there are people who like to look through other people’s medicine cabinets, though I don’t understand the compulsion. Surely one bathroom cupboard is much like another: rumpled Band-Aids, pain relief tablets, ancient capsules of prescription drugs for ailments long forgotten. Small, mysterious metal implements. A hoary mascara wand perversely plunged into a sand-encrusted tube of lipstick. A much-used disposable razor. A couple of sad-looking toothpicks. Pepto-Bismal. Dippity-Doo, circa 1962.
I don’t plan to look into the medicine cabinet of the people whose house I will be staying in when I am in Toronto this summer. (I know, I know. Toronto in the summer. What was I thinking?) But I only say that as a kind of good luck charm to prevent them from looking into mine. Because this is what it has come to, this idea of simply and cheerfully trading houses — a deep, bone-chilling fear of having my family exposed as the disorganized, slatternly packrats that we are.
I know I am not alone in this fear. A friend who has traded houses with strangers for several years invariably winds up anxiously shuffling out of her place backwards with a towel underfoot before heading to the airport. I expect that her family members are told in hysterical tones that they can wait until they get to YVR to use the toilet — if then. After all, the incoming family might use the same airport toilet and somehow instantly realize that my friend’s family member was the slob who used it previously.
The environmentalist mantra “Leave no footprints” gains new meaning when you feel forced to erase evidence of your existence from your own home. One appreciates why it must be done — so as to avoid disgusting the temporary new tenants. But one wishes it were not so.
I can’t help but wonder whether the family that is coming here is going through these same throes of terror. The husband is an e-mail friend and former editor of mine; I barely know his wife. Is she madly painting her bedroom, as I made Stanley do, and worrying that I’ll hate the colour? Is she looking around her house hopelessly, noticing how shabby things are and hoping the things at our place are equally dilapidated? Is she making a dog’s breakfast out of painting the lattice on the front deck?
Is she thinking of remodelling her kitchen by means of a large bamboo screen positioned in front of the messy wall-full of unplugged small appliances, soda crackers, roasting pans that don’t fit anywhere else, popcorn poppers, errant pennies, pens that don’t work (and may never have worked), soggy socks retrieved from the dog and the mangled pins from plastic grenades?
Is she cursing the mighty hemlocks for shedding pine needles on her deck and admonishing them sternly not to do that when the guest family is here?
In other words, is she trying to give the impression that she is everything that she is not: orderly, disciplined, pristine and tasteful? I hope not. I don’t want her to get a cold from stress while she is here.
I like my friend Peter and whomever he chose as a wife must be a decent sort. I hope she is the type not to, say, critique the towel closet or notice how few pillow slips match the sheets.
Surely this kind of angst is not what the house-swapping clubs have in mind. I wonder if spouse-swapping is as fraught. Does one tidy up one’s spouse before handing him or her over, deftly clipping his nose hairs while he naps or briskly applying cellulite cream to her thighs in the middle of the night?
Surely if he or she is less than shipshape, it reflects poorly on the absent mate. I know it shouldn’t, but doesn’t it? If he leaves the house for his assignation with a giant potbelly and everyone knows his wife does all the cooking, should she be blamed? If she dashes to her extramarital rendezvous sporting a terrible home-made bowl-cut because he told her the salon is a waste of money, should he lose points? Sounds fair to me! But then, I haven’t entered the spouse-swapping sweepstakes yet. I thought I’d better try the house-swapping scenario first and see how that worked out.
That’s why I am currently taxing my brain with the question of what to do with the contents of my dresser as well as those of my husband and children and where to shove all the stuff in our bedroom closets. I am also contemplating whether to put a padlock on the junky downstairs closet. The theory there is that the lock might make it look like a tantalizing safe full of priceless jewels or dismembered bodies instead of the oppressively dull repository for Christmas ornaments, suitcases, winter clothes and sports equipment that it actually is.
(By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask this question of some in-the-know local: Who was the genius who decided Vancouver homes didn’t need garages and that carports would suffice? Everybody knows garages are not for car storage, but for stuff you don’t want in your living-room, like paint rollers and secaturs and dog beds that might have to be used when the current one gives out. These don’t look any better rolling around your car-port than they do in your living-room.)
Between now and my vacation, I would dearly love to tear down the magazine pages tacked up on my daughter’s wall, remove the peeling Digimon stickers from the toy chest, and beef up my son’s bookshelf by clearing it of tattered Mad magazines and replacing them with impressive books about astronomy and nuclear fission. However, the only thing I will probably have time for is a quick whisk through the medicine cabinets, tossing out old bottles of nail-polish in poor colour choices and anything with crusty yellow stuff oozing out of it.
I may put the pain relief pills in alphabetical order. That’ll show ’em. Surely a person with a neat medicine cabinet can’t be all bad. And if the temporary tenants still sound shocked at the state of the place, maybe they will buy our old ruse, that just after we departed and just before they arrived, a robber must have broken in and messed up the house.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Writing > Humour
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