I love our house, but often I just need to drive away in order to step back inside again.  And in driving to town, I find myself in silly situations where I pull into the parking lot of Stop & Shop at 7AM and open up my notebook to write. I do it because it’s the first place that I find where there are no distractions and I can un-accordion my brain just a little bit.

And today there is plenty that will beg to be accomplished once I get back to the house. I’ll walk back in, armed with a cup of caffeine from Coffee Obsession. Most definitely I will start with undoing the incremental task that my father has unwittingly created since I’ve last come home. I’ll collapse and recycle a dozen empty boxes that have been sitting around “just in case”. I’ll sort, fold or donate the massive pile of clean laundry that was once remembered to be worn. And of course, there’s the dust that illuminates my allergies.

As for the dust, I’d say that Dad has a passion for building a layer so thick across the house’s horizontals that this protective coating is left virtually undisturbed by the dozens of carefully-folded paper towel squares that he lays down as drink coasters and pizza holders. They are useful for him in the moment, but by the time he gets up and comes back to where he last was, their existence is forgotten and he’s got in his hand a frosty mug and a new white folded square. He has always been a man who lives in the moment.

But the dust particles and towels—the accumulation is not a function of disuse. On the contrary, it’s more a second-order effect of household super-use. The kitchen is more like a workshop. It’s not uncommon to hear the sawing, sanding, or drilling of Dad or Brother while constructing some new treasure: a model, a box or some personalized keepsake. Maybe a full-sized lighthouse. It’s all done in the same space where pasta dough is mixed up on the granite countertop. Or while linguine dries on Dad’s handmade pasta rack. Over time, the dust from all this activity grows so heavy that without some great force like a blast from the household air compressor—or the effort of human daughter hands—none of it would ever go anywhere at all.

But I come home each time with books packed into my suitcase. I have a stack of New Yorkers and my little notebook of course. I want to be creative and feed my head with something other than my desk job. But again, if I sit at home with these things, I can’t really tend to them. If I even glance at my paperback, all I hear are hundreds of household voices softly calling to me. They pull me to myriad menial tidying tasks that, tied together, will eventually vanquish my Cape Cod day and send me looking to tomorrow for the next level of domestic disentanglement. There’s always something else that I feel as though I can put straight before I must leave again.

And then, when it is all said and done, I must quit wherever I left off and return to my small apartment located an ocean away. Unlike home, it’s a place with no soul—but still I recognize parallels between it and what I have on Cape Cod. My spare room, for example, is just teeming with stuff. There are no dust layers or origami paper towel cranes to speak of—but I can still recognize the result of yearly accumulation from my own experiences and testimony. So many discards that I have not confronted yet await a future tribunal that will ultimately send more things to the charity shop than I am consciously willing to accept right now. I too keep empty boxes that are “a really good size” in the event that I might need to mail something out.

While I don’t confront my own apartment’s disarray, I do find strange joy in executing in the same god damn cleaning ritual every time I go back to Cape Cod. Maybe there is something about clearing the space in order to allow more mess to be made. Lord knows I don’t have the craftsman’s hands like those that my father has passed on to my brother. But maybe for me, the act of stretching clearing things out—it’s like stretching a new canvas across the frame for my family; it’s the only way I know that can help to participate in their wonderful madness. To me, the collapsing of boxes and overstuffing the recycling bin…all of it, at the end of the day is an act of love.

Even if I never crack a novel and find myself spending time in empty supermarket parking lots with seagulls, there’s simply nothing like tending to home.