I Have Measured Out My Life with Coffeespoons

I often joke (dark humor, really) that over the past six years of staying at home, I have earned my Ph.D. in laundry. One of the not so glamorous aspects of the life of a stay-at-home mother is the eternal housework. It is the most unsatisfying form of work. Often people have made remarks like, "Don't you just feel good when it is done?" and the answer is, "No." When you share a space with two small children (thank goodness, I have a neat and orderly spouse), there is never that sense of accomplishment because one of them has just spilled juice on the freshly mopped floor and is peeling off their third pair of pants of the day because they are wet. The other one is in the bathroom, aiming for the tiny trash can instead of the porcelain bowl, just to see if it can be done. Housework overwhelms me. It has taken me six years to reach the conclusion that I need to put it in its place. My life is about more than washed, neatly folded AND put away towels. And so I have taken to the road.

Cate goes to preschool two mornings each week. In the past, I would have dropped her off and rushed home to ... you guessed it... clean the house. But I resolved to do that no more. For the price of preschool, I could hire one amazing woman to clean two mornings each week, leaving me to educate my own daughter. But, alas, Cate loves preschool too much and so I have done the next best thing - when she is at school, I stay away from home. On Tuesdays, I go to yoga and run errands, and maybe even read the newspaper or a book with the time I have left. On Thursdays, I take my laptop and set up shop in the local coffee shop. There are a few regulars who maintain office space for the price of a cup of coffee and I have now become one of them.

The shop is busy. It is impossible to sit there for 2.5 hours without seeing at least a quarter of everyone I know. I no longer need the local paper. I know what happened at the school board meeting, who found the Winter Carnival medallion, who is getting married or having a baby, what the village trustees decided. It is broadcast live, all around me. I enjoy a morning conversation with the man who teaches fencing and makes his own sushi. I love it when a friend stops by. I like reading the blogs of people's kids. I enjoy people telling me what I should be reading, or asking why I haven't written about something. This morning I picked up a great opening line from someone who insisted he still had one story about his life that I had not heard...: "Well, there were these two girls. One is dead and the other is a rabbi..." The rest he saved for another day. As he himself said, you can't make this stuff up.

As far as writing goes, the coffee shop is good fodder for nearly everything - current events, politics, history, character studies, gossip columns, romance, tragedy. You name it. It is all discussed at tiny tables and standing in line.

I love this small town life. I love that I can't actually write most of what I hear in its true-to-life, better than fiction form... the town is too small. Everyone would recognize themselves and each other. But the snippets of conversation are better than any brainstorming session.

Most importantly, I go home happy. The same stuff that was on the floor when I left is still there, but chances are great that even had I stayed home to clean it, Cate would have quickly moved the blocks back to the center of the floor. The neatly folded blanket would immediately be spread back out on the couch. And when I do tackle the pile of laundry still waiting by the basement door, I wonder, just what happened with those two girls - the one who is dead and the other who is a rabbi. Suddenly folding the towels isn't quite so mundane.