I think our baby bunnies have moved away, though we were rewarded one night recently with the sight of the momma appearing out from under one of our giant, alien hostas and her three babies hippity-hopping out of the nest to greet her. It was honestly very sweet and wholesome and I hope they all live forever.
However!
Monday morning, a grown-up bunny appeared in the backyard and began digging busily much closer to the patio. I do not know yet what she or he was up to, but it had better not be another baby hole. Either this is the same rabbit, knocked up again, or she is telling her slutty friends that we are the best baby hole yard in town. PLEASE STOP. I cannot spend another 4-6 weeks with an elevated heart rate, cosplaying a bunny neonatal nurse, scream-whispering at my dogs at 6:30 am to GET. AWAY. FROM THAT HOLE!!!!!!!
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the We Do Not Care Club, but I’ve become a very enthusiastic supporter. There are a lot of things I do not care about and a perhaps even larger set of things I Don’t Need To Know About (I recently texted my friend Miriam “What is Benson Boone?” And after her brief explanation I decided I am opting out of knowing anything else. I simply do not need to.)
Also in this category: any super-depressing essay on Substack (or, outlier, in The Atlantic) that makes dramatic overstatements (“Nobody Talks to Their Neighbors Anymore. Why This Means Society Will Collapse”) that is breathlessly re-posted with the comment, “A must-read.” Oh. Yeah. I simply must send myself into an anhedonic fugue state for absolutely no reason. I’ll get…RIGHT ON TOP OF THAT, ROSE. (Plus, these brainwaves are usually based on anecdotal evidence with the qualitative weight of “this one time at band camp.”)
I likewise don’t care about Meghan Markle Wimbledown Sussex VII twerking in her L&D room. I find the outrage about Meghan to be a) really weird and b) largely manufactured and it shows. Leave Meghan the fuck alone! Let her make her weird show and pretend to be a beekeeper. Let her sell her white-labeled Bonne Maman. Let her drop it like it’s hot. I could not care less, and neither should you!
Furthermore…the twerking video is cute. She didn’t post it for FOUR YEARS, during which time people accused her of wearing a fake baby bump and hiring FAKE CHILDREN for photo shoots. Then she shows up, obviously, heavily pregnant, being relatable AF, and you clutch your Temu pearls. Please sign up for a summer reading program.
I have a shameful housekeeping confession having to do with laundry. It’s hard to explain it succinctly but: we have a clothes chute, which is convenient for getting laundry down to the basement. However, the rule of “out of sight, out of mind” causes things to accumulate in the chute until nothing more can fit in it.
At this point, you would think the solution is to do some laundry. Wrong! You simply take all the stuff out of the chute and cram it into the laundry sorter where you can continue to ignore it. Meanwhile, more things pile up in the chute and you start saying things like, where are all my clothes? I thought I had…some socks?
These questions enrage you to the point where you hate-wash everything in one weekend, thereby overwhelming the house with clean laundry, which is usually deposited on the guest bed with the best of intentions. But folding that much laundry in one go is tedious, so you find yourself tossing a clothes salad every morning, looking for a specific shirt that is irredeemably wrinkled. Meanwhile, the laundry chute is filling up again.
I have come up with three rules to hopefully break this cycle:
Strive to use the laundry chute as an express highway rather than a parking lot. Any trip down the basement is a good time to grab whatever is in the chute and immediately sort it.
When one of the sorter baskets (lights, darks, colors, sheets/towels) is full, do a load of laundry, dummy.
Do not I REPEAT DO NOT take unfolded laundry upstairs. Fold it immediately out of the dryer and carry the folded items upstairs to put away.
I have been doing this for about a month, and so far it is going really well. I’ve spent a lot of time and text telling you about this slovenly aspect of my person, but, for good reason: it has made so many aspects of our lives so much nicer.
There are always clean sheets and towels.
We use cloth napkins and now there are always clean ones, meaning fewer nights of saying “oh fuck it just use paper towels,” which defeats the purpose of cloth napkins.
There is always something to wear, meaning no panicked thrashing about before leaving the house.
The clothes that are available to wear are clothes we actually like, making it much easier to identify stuff that needs to be donated, recycled, or listed on Poshmark.
Perhaps most important, the psychic weight of my gross chaotic laundry chute, overflowing sorting basket, and guest-bed clothes salad is completely gone, and I don’t spend entire weekends hate-washing everything I own and feeling like a loser.
Maybe it’s a sign of our chaotic and uncertain present that this has actually improved my life a great deal? The satisfaction that came from solving this problem without buying anything. The reclaimed mindshare of doing one or two small loads of laundry a week. The feeling of abundance that comes from opening a drawer in my dining room hutch and seeing stacks of colorful, upcycled napkins I made myself. It’s not nothing!
We shall, of course, see how long I can persist and make this a true habit. In the meantime, there must be another dysfunction I can solve. I increasingly think that the secret to true clarity of mind is just getting rid of stuff someone will have to deal with when you die, so perhaps this is the Summer of My Swedish Death Cleaning. (Did you ever read the linked book? I’m not sure I remember the main character being TWELVE.)