The devil is in the baseboards

Have you heard what the baseboards of a home have to say?

I'm definitely no Martha Stewart but I do put work into being a credible housekeeper. I derive both pleasure and pride from maintaining a well-appointed, livable house.

It's not easy with a busy teaching and dissertation schedule, or with four furry animals shedding multiply textured hair and leaving their imprints throughout the house each and every day, including discarded shells of claws, the occasional pool of pee or worse, and hard-to-identify multiply colored pukes. But I manage as well as I can and my husband pitches in, too.

I definitely don't see housekeeping as "woman's work," or believe that women are genetically programmed to do the laundry or wash the dishes. And it's not that I particularly enjoy house cleaning, which I don't, especially cleaning bathtubs, which is literally back-breaking work.

Still, house keeping is one of those few projects that gives me a complete sense of accomplishment when I'm done. What was dirty and disorganized becomes sparkly and orderly and like the rain that cleanses a humid day's air into transparency, I like the lighter air that suffuses a cleaned space (especially since I have rather bad dust allergies).

The space I call "home" has been very important to me ever since I moved out of my parents' home at 16 to attend college. Undoubtedly, my first-year room in Harvard Yard was truly ugly: a rectangular space with no distinctive features except for two twin beds, two large wooden desks, two built-in dressers and two large windows with no view to speak of.

But after sharing a room with my younger sister for most of my childhood and adolescence, it was the first space I got to decorate and maintain on my own and I enjoyed that.

By the end of that first year, the room looked like it had a split personality. My end was postered with images of Che Guevara and a large flag of Puerto Rico, while my roommate's end was decorated in soft Impressionist pastels. The room told everyone who entered (mostly my Puerto Rican friends, angling for some fresh, hot coffee prepared with the hot plate and the greca I brought from home) that no two more different people could be living together.

When I finally got to live by myself in my 20s, I had a tiny studio apartment with a one-person bathroom and a standing-room-only shower, in which the living room was the bedroom (my bed was a cheap flip-open couch) and the kitchen oven functioned as the heating system. It was so small that I and my two cats, Nube and Lawrence, barely fit. But I absolutely adored that studio.

I think living in such a compact space helped me learn to maintain my place tidy and relatively clean because, otherwise, it would easily become unlivable. And it wasn't so much for the benefit of anyone else, since I hardly ever had visitors, but for myself. I learned to take pleasure in maintaining a space that was clean and organized and inviting, even if mostly to me.

When I moved to D.C. I also took care of my apartments, and I would unpack and organize everything immediately so that the space looked lived-in even if I'd just moved in. Living in a mess is one of those few things that has the power to heavily depress me, so I simply don't allow a mess around me.

Now that I live in the house of my dreams, which is much larger than any other space I've ever had, it takes a lot more to get it to where it's alright. But I take it one step at a time and try to keep it so that I'm not too embarrassed if someone has to come in unexpectedly.

That includes fits of moving furniture around, just to give rooms a fresh look (it's a madness my poor husband puts up with, as with every other madness I have). It's gotten so that my husband's 7-year-old nephew, who visits about twice a year, always remarks on the furniture being in a different place.

"Is she ever going to stop moving furniture around?," he asked my husband in an audible whisper the last time my sister-in-law was here.

The answer to that question is probably not, especially now that I'm hooked on HGTV, which has shows like "Designed to Sell." In that show, people on a tight budget redo spaces to make them more functional and attractive. Inspired by this, I am now on a crusade to un-clutter our space here, something my ascetic-tending husband does appreciate.

But it's the baseboards that issue the ultimate challenge. Yesterday, I found myself noticing and cleaning the baseboards around the house and I actually enjoyed it. The ones in the kitchen are white, so their complaints of inattention are much louder than those of the wood baseboards in other parts of the house. Thus, I took them on with a vengeance and they were singing my praises by the time I was done.

If the devil is in the details, then the devil in the home is in the baseboards. Baseboards in a home are like fingernails (and toenails) in the body. I try to keep my fingernails well trimmed and, at the very least, with a coat of clear polish on them because fingernails say a lot. I used to chew my fingernails to the quick as a girl but when I became a woman I realized that I'd rather have fingernails that were functional and that told this story about me: "She takes care of herself."

Now that September is inching along toward October, I will soon pass the mid point of the 40s on my way to 50. And while I don't particularly celebrate that numbers game so much, I do like being in a time of life when my fingernails look good and the baseboards in my house are happy.