Judgments, mine and yours

I vacuumed under my couch cushions this morning.

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You see, last weekend one of the adult kiddos was here with a visiting friend. Said friend spent most of the weekend on my couch, relaxing from her hellish semester at college, staring blankly at her phone, and digging her stockinged feet in between the cushions of my couch like they were blankets.

Now, there is nothing wrong with folks who dig their feet in between couch cushions; I’m certain that this can’t be numbered among the more heinous rolls of character flaws.

Except…

There is nothing wrong with the couch excavating soul, except for the fact that the couch digger clearly comes from a household where someone regularly—and by regularly, I refer to a time period slightly less than once per decade—vacuumed under the couch cushions of the estate.

That one little detail is a personal affront to the sanctity of my home.

It was a long weekend.

At any given moment, if you had glanced over in my direction, you might have seen poorly veiled expressions of horror. Like the one that involuntarily crosses your face when the choir at church is stricken by a momentary yet collective inability to read music, and suffers an abrupt musical stroke. You know the one. You’re just singing along blissfully and, inexplicably and without warning, your own strident voice is suddenly hanging out there all alone under the chandelier. Your eyes grow wide as you try to reel that akilter note back in. Then they narrow as you fight to reel that look back in.

Anyway, that was the look that was beneath the surface for the bulk of the weekend, as I watched the collegiate socks rummaging around in the depths of the shamefully neglected underbelly of our living room.

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So today, when the vacuum was out surveying the landscape of our carpet, I encouraged it to take a peek under those couch cushions.

Ack.

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For those of you who are currently wearing the very expression I describe above in response to my questionable housekeeping practices, please rest easy in the knowledge that we rarely eat in the living room, and even more rarely are found in the belly of our home with our shoes still on our feet. There isn’t much that gets in there. A few kernels of popcorn—with, by the way—the shelf-life of a Twinkie. Two junctionally-located heaps of sand, apparently dropped by beachgoers upon return from the wild waters of Wisconsin sometime in summers past. And a modest collection spiral notebook sheds. Because I have children who lack any regard for the miracle of perforated pages.

Also 2 raisins.

Let’s not talk about the raisins.

My point is that I wasn’t growing penicillin—or anything of a higher order, for that matter—under there.

Please release your constricted facial muscles and go nestle your naked toes in the depths of your sanitized furniture.

And then remember who has the stronger immune system here.

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The grandboy is coming over for dinner tonight (He’s bringing his parents and his unborn sibling along). And if he is in the process of developing into one of the more vehement couch-diggers, his little toes will be safe here.

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I’ll leave you with a little giggle from Nathan Pyle…

We’ll be having homemade vast dough circles for sustenance tonight. In case you were wondering.

If you need me, I’ll be crossing that couch thing off my To Do list for the twenty-teens.

Visit soon if you’re one of them,
KJ