Other People’s Dirty Dishes

The stack of plates next to the sink had bits of dried cheese and other unidentifiable foodstuff stuck to them. A frying pan and a couple of saucepans were soaking in dirty dishwater in the sink, along with handfuls of cutlery. Unwashed drinking glasses were colonizing next to the dirty plates. I had just recovered a couple more from the living room where they had been abandoned, water rings left behind on the garage-sale end tables.

The house was quiet. The students who weren’t still sleeping in their bedrooms were scattered across campus, attending class or studying in the library.

And I was annoyed.

***

Nearly a quarter century ago, I spent four years living in community with college students. When I accepted a campus ministry position as a co-director of a co-ed discipleship house in Erie, Pennsylvania, I had idealized notions of what that would look like. These ideals were founded on my own experience a few years earlier, when I spent the summer between my junior and senior years of college living in Ocean City, New Jersey, in a co-ed house with fifteen other Christian college students and four campus ministers.

We shared a house and we shared meals. By day, we worked in souvenir shops and pizza parlors, or we cleaned hotel rooms or mowed lawns. In the evenings, we took turns leading Bible studies and learning from teachers who visited each week to help us grow in our faith and our leadership abilities. All of this while living a couple blocks from the beach.

We laughed and learned and flirted and grew in our relationships with one another and with the God we were getting to know better. For two months, we experienced the very best parts of living in community. And then we tearfully said goodbye and returned to our families and our different college campuses.

When we parted ways, we were barely out of the honeymoon stage.

***

Two years into being a campus minister and a “house mother”—at age 24—the honeymoon was definitely over.

I was now one of the adults, living with students who had varying motives for living in this house. For some, it was an opportunity to live with other Christian students and to grow in faith and learn how to share that faith with their peers. For some, it was an inexpensive alternative to the university’s residence halls or campus-owned apartments. And for others, it was a combination of the two.

Dirty dishes were the tip of the iceberg. There were so many more issues below the surface.

We were a motley crew. Protestants and Catholics and agnostics. Republicans and Democrats and independents. Young women and men transitioning from adolescence to adulthood, and two campus ministry “house parents” who did not have much of an age advantage but were trying to help these students to ask good questions and figure out who they were and who they were becoming.

This was no two-month adventure at the Jersey shore with relatively like-minded people. This was nine months of classes and midterms and finals and debates about whether the TV should be tuned to CNN (the general preference of the international students) or MTV (the rest of the students) or shouldn’t be turned on at all (the house directors).

dirty-dishes-resized-600This was a minimum two-semester commitment to weekly house dinners and meetings on Sunday evenings, followed by living life together the rest of the week.

It was difficult for some of us to resist the temptation to keep an hour-by-hour mental tally of who cleaned up after themselves and who did not.

For much of my time in that house, I disregarded the importance of the mundane, day-to-day, messy business of living life together. My focus was on house dinners and Bible studies and philosophical conversations. These were important. But my passive-aggressive response to dirty dishes and TV channel disagreements contributed to the mess—and dismissed real opportunities for growth and identity formation.

I wish someone had shared with me back then that the secret to a healthy community living environment is being willing to put up with each other’s messes.

Or better yet, to pitch in and help clean them up.

***

Amy YAH bio

One Winter Morning

I’m sure that my home is here somewhere under all of this stuff, and so I sit in my attic bedroom and try to imagine it.

There. There is a chair under that mound of coats, smuggled upstairs for a Christmas Eve party (oh, the appearance of first-floor cleanliness!) and never returned. Next to the chair is “my” desk, which is a bit of a joke around here. I can barely see its edges under the wrapping paper, tape, and  children’s art supplies that show up as soon as I create a clean surface.

How many markers-without-caps can one family collect? I’ll let you know once our experiment is complete.

The bins of kid clothes are stacked in the corner, over-flowing with the next season and the next size. Our oldest daughter has grown an inch in two months and I vaguely remember setting aside extra-long pants in September. But which bin? I’m not sure, but I do know that I’m not up for the search right now. And then I remember. “It doesn’t matter,” I exclaim, “because it’s boot season!” The blessed boots will cover her ankles until I find those pants.

Our brand-new kitten bounds up the stairs, and I sigh-and grin- as she pounces into the room. Who gets a seven-year old a kitten for her birthday? Crazy people, that’s who. Our two older cats awake and glare from the bed. They are not amused. I can hear her tiny collar bell jingling as she weaves her way through the piles, enjoying the tunnels and hiding places that all our stuff creates.

On the second floor there are hurried footsteps and I hear our housemates’ bedroom door open and -slam!- as the kids head for the bathroom, trying unsuccessfully not to wake their parents. Their loud whispers are a familiar morning sound. Our two families have been living together for almost three years now, with four kids (now ages 7, 6, 5 and 5) between us. Currently their family of four is living in one bedroom, as they prepare to move into a newly renovated house down the street and we make room for my newly arrived brother-in-law.

Never a dull moment round here.

The kitten hears the kids-now all four are awake-and she leaves her grumpy sentinels behind, tumbling down the stairs toward the sound of laughter. The kids are beside themselves because there is a two-hour snow delay. “Two more hours to pla-ay!” one of them sings, and I hear the kitten’s bell as she joins the party.

The elder cats have re-positioned themselves on the bed and are sound asleep. “Must be nice,” I say. I look around again, readying myself to join the fray downstairs. “I guess this is why grown-up cats don’t need coffee but grown-up humans do.”

I head for the kitchen, passing the piles of clean, unfolded clothes and trying to calculate when I’ll have time today to “finish” this endless task.

Then I stop.

Suddenly, I remember that the piles will not always be there. Suddenly, I remember that home is a seasonal place.

IMG_0897I think of the kitten tunnels, the ever-growing kids, and our parade of housemates, transitioning in and out, but always leaving their mark. “And it’s good,” I declare over the laundry, “very good.” And in this moment I believe it. In this moment, just for a brief moment, I settle into my life as it is today. Here. Now. And not forever.

“Pancakes!” my husband calls, and the kids are a herd of elephants coming down the stairs. I pass the kitten on my way to the first floor, and she is purring loudly.  “Well here you are, little one,” I say as I stroke her fur, “Welcome home.”