Make a List

I’m not opposed to record keeping. On the contrary, I am very interested in leaving behind a record of my life, so that in case someday archaeologists, or perhaps child welfare authorities, stumble upon my home, there will be some evidence that adults have lived here.

But I’m just not a scrapbooker. And the last journal that I kept ended with an entry about how upset I was that my mother wouldn’t let me stay up the night before to watch The Love Boat.

So I’m always looking for new and innovative methods of "journaling," and I considered it a good tip when a friend told me that making lists can be a quick and easy way to record family history. Therefore, in the interest of historical preservation, I took some time today to write down the following list:

Things I Found Behind My Oven This Morning

When I Pulled It Out From the Wall to Replace a Part

•  Three pumpkin seeds
• Thirty-five cents
• An admission ticket to "A Christmas Fantasy", held November 22-24 (it didn’t say what year)
• A scrap of paper which said "Bankruptcy Notice" and then some other stuff I didn’t want to read
• Five stale cheese puffs
• One roll of duct tape
• Half a Dorito
• Four pens, two and a half pencils, and seven crayons
• A note reading: "Mom IM gone ill be back"
• A set of rubber "Billy Bob" hillbilly teeth
• One cheese tortellini
• One bottle of sunscreen
• Two hundred thirty seven dollars in Monopoly money
• A miniature candy bar wrapper that read "To My Valentine"
• A mostly eaten piece of pizza
• One air soft gun pellet
• Two chocolate chips (one milk chocolate, one semi-sweet)
• Approximately three cups of mixed dust, leaves, rocks and bugs

Now in the interest of truth, I offer one more list:

Things Behind My Oven Now That I Have Fixed It and Pushed It Back Into Place

(Everything on the above list, minus the thirty-five cents, the Billy Bob Hillbilly Teeth and the milk chocolate chip.)

Yes, of course I thought about sweeping behind there while I had it pulled out.  I even started to go get the broom. But since I couldn’t immediately find the broom, I had some time to think about what I was about to do. The more I considered it, the more I realized it might not be a good idea, and I’ll tell you why.

When I was a kid, I had a friend whose mother pulled the refrigerator out from the wall to clean behind it every week. And my sister once dated a guy who told her that one of his mother’s weekly tasks was to go down to the basement utility room and dust the water heater. (I’ll let you guess what my advice to my sister was.) And once I overheard a woman telling her friend that her mother had regularly scrubbed around the base of the toilet with a toothbrush.  "That’s nothing," the friend said. "My mother did that, and then she flossed around there, too."

What I’m saying is, there are plenty of people in the world who keep house in a manner that would prevent me from wanting to be their next door neighbor. Do I want to turn into one of them? Of course not.

Now, it’s true that sweeping out behind my oven, a region which clearly bore evidence that several major holidays had passed since its last cleaning, wouldn’t exactly put me on par with the homemaker who turns her vacuum on more often than I flush a toilet. But who knows what might have happened if I’d picked up that broom? What if, knowing that the space behind my oven was sparkling clean, I’d had a hankering to peek behind the microwave? And then, after answering a compulsion to get that clean too, I might have moved onto the other appliances. Before long, I could be browsing the internet searching for a fun craft idea to use the twenty-seven pounds of lint I’d found behind my dryer. Next thing you know, I’m taking all the light bulbs out of their sockets to give them a sponge bath, and staying up late organizing my supply of toilet paper by purchase date and ply count. Soon I’m wiping down the inside of the dishwasher with disinfecting wipes after every load and using a Q-Tip and a magnifying glass to clean the shower.  From there, it’s a short walk to becoming the woman standing in her kitchen crying, screaming at the child who last unloaded the dishwasher, "The ⅓ cup measure goes between the ¼ and the ½! Am I the only person in this house with any sense of reason and order?"

It’s a slippery slope. I decided to err on the side of safety.

You know, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that I did the right thing. In fact, I’m going to put the Billy Bob Hillbilly teeth back behind the oven. That way, when Halloween rolls around again, I’ll know just where they are. After all, I’ve got it down on paper.