If your house is in order...

you'll just feel better.

At least that's what my mom and her cousin Judy profess. And we believe them. I'll get back to that.

Strode Rode by Sonny Rollins is playing.

I have a lot of cousins and cousins are special. They show you more about who you are. They are mirrors into yourself.

My mom's got these double cousins. My mom's dad's sister and my mom's mom's brother married and had five kids. Did you get that? No incest...you may want to read that sentence again to make sense of it: My mom's dad's sister and my mom's mom's brother married and had five kids. My mom had 5 siblings herself so you can imagine that the whole gaggle of them are quite a bit alike. If you've been with my mom and her sister in the same room and been stunned by how alike they are in mannerisms and physical appearance, then imagine being with the two of them and with their cousins Judy or Jerene or Jane of Jo. It is downright eerie.

Judy and my mom are the best of friends, they are closest in age. Her daughters, Jolie and Amy, are something like 10 and 12 years older than me, which when you are kids is a lifetime. They actually lived in the same street that we lived on about two blocks away, but they moved outside of Portland about the same time I started having memories. I remember visiting them at their house in Canby and being very interested in Amy's minatures. I also remember that when I was in high school Jolie married a guy from Salem and she moved into the neighborhood. My mom hosted wedding showers and baby showers for her. I also remember when Amy came home from LA (it seemed so far away and cool) to get married in her mom's backyard. So, I knew them, a little.

When I got married Amy and Jolie and Judy basically saved the day. They put almost everything together. I mean everything. I made a few choices on invitations, location, a cake and a dress and fled to California to start a job. A month later I showed up and had a wedding. For that, I am forever indebted to them.

The thing about cousins is that when you stumble into one another at some one time or another in life you find that you have a lot in common. Alot in common. Several of my cousins who have tuned into my blog here and there have commented that my favorites, as listed on my profile, are their favorites. Weird. Who knew that other people watch CSI and Zoom?

As I have had kids, Amy and I have had a chance to catch up a couple of times, never for very long. My most recent visit with her was virtually uninterrupted. The kids are big enough to fend for themselves most of the time and my husband wasn't there and her's was smoking ribs (yum!).

We covered alot: mean kids, petty annoyances of our husbands, family history, why we work, current family news, the secret ingredient in her cookies (white pepper), and what we wear to sleep in. But the thing I found myself thinking about as I feel asleep and then thought about for a week or so is our obsession with super-clean.

Amy and I are pretty neat and tidy people, if you compare us to the rest of the population. But in our families we have the reputation of being slobs. Dirty slobs. When I arrived at Amy's her house was immaculate--it took her two days of heavy labor to get it that way and it was lovely. It felt like home. You see, our grandmothers were crazy clean. My grandma used to scrub the walls of her house three times a year. I just learned that she used to collect rainwater because it cleaned better. She was clean and then some.

And my mom feels like a slouch compared to her mom.

Before arriving at Amy's, I came from a new home that I am furiously trying to get set up just so...so neat, so clean, so perfect. Because on some level I believe what our moms have been telling us "if your house is in order, you'll feel better." And that's true because a mess clutters your mind. And also, when you are constantly cleaning and tidying you don't have to stop and think about how you are really feeling and when you are done you are too tired to think beyond the satisfying feeling of having a clean, tidy house for a few moments before you collapse.

So I've been turning this one over in my head and I wonder what the off-spring of the other double cousins think. Do they, too, feel like if they are clean and neat they are okay? Do they feel like if you can't get it to mother or grandmother clean, what's the point? Do they sometimes feel unworthy because their kitchen table is full of papers and there are dust bunnies in the corners?