There Will Come Messy Kids

In the Ray Bradbury classic science fiction short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” people of the future live (or lived) in a highly automated house. One image from that story has always stuck with me – the ashes from the cigar that the house automatically lights and then burns down because no one smokes it are automatically swept away by robotic mice that scurry around cleaning up even the tiniest mess. It’s an interesting fantasy and probably a great labor saving device. But we don’t need scurrying robot mice in our home. We have Andrea.

Andrea scurries around behind the rest of our family, cleaning up every tiny mess. Crumbs left from your piece of toast are vacuumed up. Tiny bits of leaf brought in from outside are disposed of. Smudges on the windows or floors or counters are wiped away with Windex. Every item has an assigned place, and anything out of place is quickly returned. She keeps a beautiful house. And it’s infectious – after ten years of marriage, I too am an official clean freak.

It was from Andrea that I learned the meaning of the term “spotless.” In a previous life, it was a theoretical construct, essentially a synonym for “clean.” In an Andrea Kimmel household, the meaning is literal. “Spotless” means “No spots.” Not one spot. If you see a spot, you clean it up. If you see a crumb, you vacuum it up. The mice in Soft Rains are tireless, ceaseless, mechanical, robotic. In our house, we’re tireless, ceaseless, mechanical, neurotic.

(Spolier Alert) The house in Soft Rains is cleaning up the mess after a nuclear holocaust, but Andrea is cleaning up after something much worse – Cody Kimmel. Cody is the opposite of Spotless. Like Spot-ful. Many Spots. Cody simply cannot engage in an activity without making a mess. His favorite meal, grilled cheese, becomes a crumb shower for himself and his surroundings. He’s spilled every drink he’s touched. Every trip to the fridge ends with yogurt on the floor. Every dinner can be transferred to sleeve which can then be transferred to wall.

All that is accidental. It’s the intentional stuff that is particularly infuriating.  Let’s face it, kids- especially boys- just destroy stuff. Do you like your stuff? Don’t have kids. Kids take all your nice, lovely stuff – the stuff you’ve worked hard to obtain, lovingly selected and cared for, collected and cultivated – and they break that stuff. Destroy it. Render your priceless collection into worthless crap. Cody loves nothing more than to kick a hole in the door or scratch a big scratch on a wall. Those smudges that Andrea is furiously scrubbing away? He’s planting big fat new ones on the windows.

And Cody’s very favorite activity, which takes him almost no time at all, is making a giant mess of a room. Cody will dump the contents of a drawer full of toys on the floor and then minutes later, with his short attention span satiated, will move on to another room and another drawer. Andrea or I will take a moment to clean a few breakfast dishes and literally turn to see we have a giant mess in the playroom which needs to be picked up before we head out for the day. You can see the self-perpetuating madness in this – in the time it takes to clean the playroom mess, Cody will have created two more in his bedroom.

The title There Will Come Soft Rains is from the poem the automated house reads to itself as the day winds down. It plays classical music and shows colorful animal images on the nursery wall. The house is quiet, happy, clean (at least until it burns down in holocaust fires). It turns out that it takes an empty house to make a clean house, but until the day the kids go to college or they invent robot cleaning mice, we’ll have to rely on Andrea to keep us spot free.