When the season finally ends, heredity, environment wage war

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I scrub the grout on the kitchen floor with a toothbrush, scouring with a paste made of Cascade and water, while, I know an army of ants munches away at the walls, the beams, the very foundations of my house.

The ants will have to wait until later. I scrub the grout for hours, get half the floor done and then get distracted and involved in something else.

I do the same thing in my office. I make neat little piles on my desk, sort and file, put the files away, stepping over newspapers and magazines that litter the floor. I never get the whole office done. The task is beyond me.

In the yard, the bushes look like Stephen King monsters, they're so out of shape. The grass you could make skirts from. The patio is hidden by weeds.

But I ignore these flaws and focus instead on one tenacious vine is strangling the pachysandra in the garden I can see from my kitchen window. I attack that vine with a vengeance, pulling it out by its roots. Why am I doing all this? Why am I so fragmented?

What strikes me as I attempt, for the zillionth time, to tidy one small area of my increasingly untidy world, is how endless it all is. You can never get it done. You can never catch up. Floors get dirty. Weeds grow back. Desks were made for clutter. Ants will win the war. So why am I doing these things?

Because it's September. Because somebody turned the calendar in the middle of a warm summer night and Bingo, never mind that it's still beach weather, never mind that these are summer's best days, never mind that the light is perfect and the air clean and the shadows long and the world lush, the race has begun. Summer is now unofficially over and ready or not, it's time to get organized!

It's a Pavlovian thing, learned in childhood. The days get shorter, the nights get cooler, school buses crowd the roads, plaid skirts appear in store windows, dogs start to shed and who cares if the world says there's still plenty of recess time left and begs us to go out and play. The calendar insists recess is over and we live by calendars and schedules and lists of things to do. And so, while summer is outside waiting for us to share in its final days, we're sorting and scrubbing and cleaning and filing and labeling and putting things away.

When you're a kid excited about going back to school, this time of year is actually fun. I remember liking the annual ritual of cleaning out the closet, stuffing all my summer clothes in a big cardboard box and stuffing it in the back of the closet so I could make room for new blouses with Peter Pan collars and cardigan sweaters and plaid woolen skirts.

I remember year after year stepping back and looking at the closet all neat and organized, blouses in one place, skirts in another, and thinking this is how it should always look. This is how I should live my life, as a neat human being.

I remember, too, how short-lived this neatness was. A few days into school and the desk drawers I'd cleaned out would be full of gum wrappers and folded notes passed in class. All the new clothes would be draped on chairs and the summer clothes would be out of the closet, out of the box and all over the floor.

And I would be in shorts again, outdoors, school and neatness and seriousness of purpose put on hold until the raw winds of November forced me indoors. That's what always happened. I started off neat and ended up sloppier than ever.

My kids did the same and continue to do the same. Heredity wages war with environment every September.

Still we try. We give it our best. We show up for the race. We get ourselves psyched. We carry trash bags and Mr. Clean from room to room. We say "Out, damned spot!" for at least a couple of days.

And then we quit. We give up on the grout and the office and the weeds. We put on our shorts and sit in the sun and savor these last days of summer.