Variety in a Life of Spice

I take back what I said in my last entry. I am not becoming a Real Wife. My reasoning behind this is that most housewives don’t spend the morning of their guests’ arrival attempting to dry pillowcases with a hairdryer.

I have always dreamed of having a certain house.

The house has never really taken on a visual shape in my dreams. I don’t dream of colours or numbers of rooms. But I do dream of a house where the carpets are clean and fluffy; a house with a general feeling of air, light and space; a house where the kitchen smells of toast and coffee in the mornings and where wellington boots are lined up neatly in racks by the back door.

So far, I haven’t ever managed to achieve that house for more than a day. The carpets aren’t clean and fluffy, mainly because they are cream-coloured and will only look clean for about one hour after hoovering them before I spot dirt on them again, but also, admittedly, because I generally can’t see them due to the piles of clothes and assorted papers all over them. Feelings of air, light and space are hard enough to come by in a tiny thatched cottage, without the persistent cobwebs hanging just out of my reach on the stairs; and the kitchen never smells of coffee in the mornings because either we wake up and get out of the house so early that neither of us has breakfast, or we sleep in so late that it wouldn’t be decent to have breakfast by the time we finally get out of bed.

For the last month, however, we have been attempting to stick to a Routine. We have been trying to get up early enough every day to say morning prayer. Sometimes we’ve slipped a bit and ended up saying midday prayer instead, but we have experienced several mornings when the kitchen smelt of toast and coffee at a reasonable hour. Then, yesterday, I blitzed our bedroom and uncovered a large area of carpet through the clever re-assignment of shelves to hold books.

Now, some mornings, I have a moment on the landing as I leave the tidy bedroom and smell breakfast wafting up the cobweb-free stairs, when I am standing on the edge of a dream. It all feels rather fragile. But I’ve also baked two sets of muffins in as many weeks. Could it be possible that I’m transforming into a Real Wife?