Lares and Penates

The suburbs? Well, for heaven’s sake who wouldn’t choose the absolute convenience? Cheap, a quick commute, and close to Lowe’s, a Steak ’n Shake, our own police and DMV, a library, a lake. Esteemed domestic diplomats, we trump conundrums (His and Hers) and smother any fuss that stirs the air of habit habitats. It’s not an easy job; in short, we wear a lot of hats. And so, we’re grateful, from the street you’d miss the issues we’re ignoring: termites and week-old dishes mooring, barnacled with shredded wheat, the bunch of brown bananas stuck with a yellow Post-it:Eat! We dictate chores, but understand the clock moves faster than we do and focus on those old and blue dilemmas of the second hand: inheritance, ill-fitting pants, smoke, rumors, foreclosed land. Winters, we help keep track of taxes, sort copies Xerox-hot in piles, or prune unruly hanging files (a fixture of our weekend praxis). There’s always something. In this house, only the cat relaxes— because the clutter drives a need for more, more room, more hours, food, more use of the subjunctive mood . . . tomorrow, yes, we must succeed in keeping peace and making time to garden, and to read. Still, every spring our porches spawn insects we can’t identify and ferns turned freeze-dried octopi. They spill into the arid lawn with diasporic fliers, clover and choirs of woebegone house sparrows whose incessant cheeping recalls the gloomy Ubi sunt, our soundtrack to the nightly hunt for whatever is downstairs, beeping. (As if the sleepless wanted some reminder they’re not sleeping.) But don’t fret; clarity, if brief, is possible. The best folks see an artfulness in entropy— the rust, the dust, the bas-relief of Aquafresh-encrusted sinks. So when, in disbelief, a lady skims new catalogs, convinced her luster’s fading, faded, and, afraid to end up jaded, doughy in orthotic clogs, she gracefully accepts her fate and rises early. Jogs.