Tidy and Sloppy Neighbors, June 1, 1961, Saturday Evening Post. Illustration by John Falter

KYLE writes:

I recently drove through my old neighborhood on the way home one evening and noticed that a plurality of the houses my childhood friends grew up in, homes built in the 1970s, haven’t aged gracefully. Most of the aesthetic ornamentation of these houses has become blackened from dirt and brake dust. Window shutters, glass panes, aluminum siding, gutters, entry sidewalks, and garage doors are long overdue for a good pressure washing. Wooden deck patios are a good shove away from falling down. Flowerbeds are barren from being washed out by clogged gutters that flood the bed below and wash out the mulch. Often times garden beds are clogged with dried up leaves from the previous autumn.

Large weeds are often indistinguishable from the plants next to them. The concrete driveways we played basketball on now feature a multitude of spider-web-like cracks and in some cases, they’ve damn near been pulverized to gravel. The streets are riddled with erosion from salt that city workers pound on it during winter months. The same streets are soiled from the engine oil of parked vehicles, giving the neighborhood streets the seedy look of a Wal-Mart parking lot. Sidewalks are blanketed with dried up grass from the failure to sweep or blow off after mowing the lawn. The “to-do” list for some of these homes will undoubtedly grow as the years roll by, but it wasn’t always this way.

As far as I know, this neighborhood hasn’t fallen into the hands of destitute families. Some of these conditions surely can be blamed on these households’ lack of disposable income, as many Americans have struggled in the wake of the 2008 collapse.

But has the attitude towards caring for the sacredness of the personal living space–the family home — changed as well?  I often think to myself: “If the outside looks like that, what does the inside look like? Unfortunately the insides of many homes today are just as bad, if not worse, than their straggly exteriors.

Coming from a family that owned rental property, I spent summers in my youth cleaning up the messes left behind by renters in homes that were less than a decade old. My father would answer service repair calls from tenants and upon entering the home would see dirty dishes piled up in the sink and pet hair coating the furniture. Eviction repairs would lead to replacing carpet, which often led to the discovery that pets had brought fleas into the home. Garbage disposals had to be replaced because tenants broke them.

Entire sections of drywall would be covered in crayon doodles where parents let their children use the space as a coloring book. Patches of carpet would be riddled with coffee stains left to dry because soaking it up with carpet cleaner and a wet rag required too much effort. Many of these tenants broke their rental agreements and hid their slovenly behavior from my father until it was too late and they had to be evicted, mostly from payment delinquency, their deposits never to be returned. This isn’t behavior relegated to any particular class of people as I’ve noticed similar or worse conditions while visiting the homes of co-workers, friends, and relatives who own their house and have college educations.

Perhaps lack of time is a major factor, or the primary cause.  If this is true, the blame can be placed on the rise of two-income households. The family home has become just a rest stop where harried family members drop in to use the bathroom, eat, sleep and watch Netflix. They told us that having “two incomes” would improve the lives of families. The evidence has shown that it has erased the free time necessary to maintain a clean and healthy living environment and, most importantly, to raise a family.

This lack of time may also explain why former latch-key children, the Millennials and Gen-Xers of my generation, are comfortable with living a grungy lifestyle. Their parents were never home to show them the right way. The pride that comes  from dawdling around with repairs in the garage and reshaping the land around the house with one’s own hands on a Saturday afternoon is something they may never know.

I was fortunate enough to learn early on the pleasures of manual work.

I’ve never felt more satisfied after a day’s work at any job as I did when I was working in construction and landscaping. As a teenager, I spent many 90-degree summer days on a landscaping crew where I raked dirt plots of newly built homes with just a common garden rake. I sewed grass seed and fertilizer with a hand-crank spreader strapped across my chest and walked rows up and down the lot until it was set for straw. I’d spread bales of hay out hand, only renting a straw spreader on  the rarest occasions. I’d then sweep up excess seed and straw off the driveways and sidewalks with a utility broom, which kicked up clouds of dirt that caked my sweaty skin.

Each day ended with a itchy eyes from hay-fever and a cold shower that stung as it washed a stream of dirty brown water down the drain. I learned not to be afraid of manual labor.

It seems that previous generations looked forward to performing the labor required to maintain a lawn and garden — something they couldn’t do in stuffy city apartments. They had a deep appreciation for the elbow room in the suburbs. These servile tasks represented freedom, not servility. But the current world has come to see them as a burden. They are a form of hard work not advocated or understood in the air-conditioned halls of the university.

There are two sorts of poverty: material and spiritual.

I passed by the field of the slothful man, and by the vineyard of the foolish man: And behold it was all filled with nettles, and thorns had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall was broken down. Which when I had seen, I laid it up in my heart, and by the example I received instruction. Thou wilt sleep a little, said I, thou wilt slumber a little, thou wilt fold thy hands a little to rest.And poverty shall come to thee as a runner, and beggary as an armed man. 

Proverbs 24:30-34 (Douay-Rheims)

When we opt to do the bare minimum and flee from menial tasks, our problems multiply like the weeds in a poorly-kept garden. They may ultimately bury and impoverish us.

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