May 24

Sing it with me, friends, to the tune of Yellow Submarine:

We all live in an entropy machine, entropy machine, entropy machine.

This house, man. I usually try to go more than 24 hours between arson threats, but let me say again: I might have to set it on fire.

At the beginning of May I made myself another habit tracker. May is the time of year when I am most energetic, and I wanted to use the days well. Many of my habit-tracker columns have worked out really nicely: daily read-aloud time with Stella, daily exercise, daily writing time, daily music-making. They are not lofty goals. I haven't tackled anything new and complicated on the piano, but I learned a fun easy version of Rule, Britannia, and today when I was tempted to feel a little blue about not being able to sing Hail The Day That Sees Him Rise at church, I just sat down and played it myself instead.

But one of my goals was to spend some time every day making the house a little nicer, and I am tired of that habit. I did a lot of small good things in the service of that goal. I painted the walls in the back entryway; I smote the mildew in the downstairs tub with a paste of bleach and baking soda. I fixed the hole in a bedroom wall from that time when someone opened the door too vigorously and the doorknob punched through the drywall; I fixed the hole in the ceiling from that time when the bunkbeds put a Gladly kid up too high. I cleared a lot of junk from a lot of places. But somehow there remains a lot of junk, and I have been losing steam over the last week.

"There's something to be said for moving every two years," I said to my husband today. "Ah, yes," he said sarcastically. "You loved it when we were moving every two years." [Reader, I did not love it.] "But it forces you to live a stripped-down life," I told him earnestly. "There's something to be said for that."

Joe went back to his boarding school for the last time yesterday, to pick up the stuff he left there in mid-March when they announced that spring break would last a bit longer than originally planned. He has been a whirling dervish of order and industry today. He cleaned out a closet, unprompted; he purged and organized his room from top to bottom. I suppose I should be happy that the kid who used to insist that I should save his toenail clippings came downstairs today to announce "I will NEVER be a hoarder."

Maybe one of the keys to avoiding burnout is getting help from other people in my family. Fighting entropy alone is a lonely job, but the kids have been great about noticing and appreciating the things I've been doing around the house. And I think, too, another piece of it is the habits/goals tension. It might work better for me to say "We are going to clean all the JUNK out of the basement by June 30!" instead of slashing away at random disorderly spots, one solitary stroke at a time.

We shall see. The habit-tracker I made on April 30 only had 23 slots, so I have spent this 24th day of May feeling free of pressure to tick any boxes. But tomorrow I will make another one, and perhaps I will figure out an approach that allows me to have less entropy and also less frustration. Are you braced for more exciting habit-tracking updates? Don't turn that dial!