Better Homes and Hillbillies

The Next Thing You Know, Your Stinking Life Will Become the Unlovely Thing You So Despise

by Homeless T

My bewitching first wife of nearly twenty-eight years' marriage--or as I prefer to remember our moments together, more than 88 million precious seconds--has always believed that anything unbeautiful deserved no place in her home. She was forever banishing any unlovely object that dared to fall under her gaze to somewhere she wouldn’t have to look at it—usually the garage, the basement, the crawlspace, or in cases requiring special rendition, a hole in the backyard, dug under moonlight, to strains of Mozart.

Thus and so you are to me

Her view was, who needed to look at decrepitude and decay? Wasn't it bad enough that she had sometimes to look at me? Only a home-decorating genius like her could have figured out that the easy, practical way to control the unsightly debris of everyday life--the dirty diapers, trash, encrusted sauce-pans, dust, husbands, and mold--was simply to purge the mind of their presence by hiding them.

She also treated the common implements of domesticity--brooms, trash cans, dustpans, and vacuum cleaners--in much the same, see-no-evil manner. When she ran out of places to conceal messes, she started stashing them in a new place where they fit in--my room! She wasn't about to make them the centerpiece of our home!

I suppose she chose my room because I was always dragging them out anyway. I considered myself tidy, and appreciated the convenience of wastebaskets and brooms and clothes hampers. Even the limpest, most unattractive dish-rag held a certain attraction for me at one time or another, so it may have been from jealously that she did as she did. She just couldn't compete with a dust-buster.

She got so fanatical about immediately putting them far out of sight, that I found myself fantasizing about readily available brooms, trash cans and other such forbidden fruit. I confess now that I'd become quite dirt-minded.

 * * *

The real Jesus Christ—who, by the way, may have looked and acted more like Osama Bin Laden than Madison Avenue ever dare acknowledge—might not have approved of the wild-eyed, squealing pagans who swarm in His Name on Christmas morning like Santa's spawn, of questionable worthiness to faith. Naturally, these otherwise normal children monkey-paw all those fussy wrapping jobs to shreds, and rip the boxes within from stem-to-stern in their haste to unseal them. These piles of instant trash are a monument that even the most visionary home improvement specialist can't mentally block. I took drastic action on Christmas day.

Big trash called for serious measures. When the avalanche of rumpled foil wrapping paper, frayed ribbon, and shiny shards of smashed ornaments hit the floor, so did I—dragging behind me the rolling, black Yard Boy, a trash can giant. My wife quailed and quavered in the face of its all-devouring, cavernous maw. How dare I? Get that fuckin' thing out of here! I could’ve stuffed her in and carted her off, and nobody would’ve been the wiser. But Yard Boy had been summoned for the hallowed purpose of containing the Christmas morning refuse--not to conceal her bony, unholy cadaver.

As those 88 million seconds crawled by . . . second . . . by . . . ecstatic . . . second, my wife Calloween not only banned discouraging objects from sight, she often did away with them altogether. During our seconds together, I never once saw her sweep a kitchen floor. When it got so dirty that her moon boots stuck to it, trapping her like a roach in a roach motel, she would drop to her knees and play the role of long-suffering scrub-woman, dabbing at the spots with a moist tissue, and smearing the dirt around with some wet paper toweling for good measure.

When buckled edges and indelible stains finally overwhelmed her, she ripped the whole floor up—only to discover another layer of linoleum, equally appalling, beneath. Up it came, unleashing anachronistic molecules of the fabulous fifties. Up that came, too. When finally she rested, she had torn up a half-dozen layers of flooring that dated back to 1899—that she dragged, sheaf-by-filthy-sheaf, out to the back yard and dumped in a hole.

Some long-dormant whooping-cough bacillus must have found its chance to escape as she was pulling up layers of flooring, and we all came down with it. When CNN reported the inexplicable whooping cough epidemic in the heartland, its epicenter looked suspiciously close to our little town.

Soon she’d ripped up all the carpeting and buried it in the back yard, too. She pulled down the awnings that shaded the west-facing windows and buried them--why, I'll never know--but finding the westward view still uninspired, she got rid of the window screens, too. A clear view at last!

The bathroom tile apparently failed to evoke the spirit of harmony in her, so she pried it up, and again stripped away multiple layers of floor beneath that--only to find the original floor, circa 1899, that had been cobbled together of mismatched scrap wood recovered from a burned-down chicken coop. Gaping, ragged holes had been pecked out around the fixtures. Into these unremovable eyesores, she stuffed bunches of colorful plastic flowers, creating the ambiance of bathing in a lovely tropical garden—if you kept the lights turned off, and wore shoes in the bathtub.

It was at this point that I called Better Homes and Gardens--surely their readers would be interested in her pioneering work. The editor sadly informed me that I had them mixed up with Psychotic Homes and Gardens, a brief-lived but very colorful publication, that had only published a single, imaginary issue. However, I could try Better Homes and Hillbillies. In the end, my innovative spouse succeeded in popularizing a whole new genre of genteel home decor, now referred to by local law enforcement as the Hellzapoppin School of object placement.

Luckily her eyesight was so bad that she had never even seen the mites, cat dander, and particulate fecal matter surfing on the sunbeams that now poured through her west-exposed windows. She’d have been at a mental loss for how to cope with such a confluence of tiny, unbeautiul things. She couldn’t just pick up a general level of filth and throw it in the garage. She’d have had to burn the house down--which in retrospect seems another opportunity lost.

I sensed that something fundamental had shifted in our life together when I discovered that my bed was missing. Don't ask me why, but she’d muscled it out the bedroom window and then dragged it out to the alley, where she'd left it. Where had it gone? I asked. It's not in the alley anymore. She explained that a passing troupe of gypsies had taken it, damn glad to get it too. The floor was better for my back anyway, she said, and I'd better get used to it. That was that. I didn’t even say anything because to tell you the truth, life with Mommy had become so much fun that I'd given up trying to make sense of anything she did.

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