Last Saturday morning, I awoke to find a text from my cousin Roger that read "When you get a minute, can you please call me?" Obviously I panicked. WHO WAS DEAD??? Clearly something terrible had occurred to necessitate a cryptic text at 7:43 on a Saturday morning. But I didn't have messages from any of my other family, and the chance that there had been a total annihilation of the Peters clan, only excepting me and Roger, seemed unlikely. So I calmed myself down and called him back. Here's a transcription:
ROGER: Hello?
ME: Hey, Rog, it's Melanie.
ROGER: Well, hey there, cousin! Say, what city do you live in again?
ME: St. Paul.
ROGER: I thought so. That's where we are! Any chance we could get to see you?
And that moment there, the microsecond after Roger said the word "you", is the exact moment when the scurryfunge began.
A few years back, a boyfriend of mine gave me one of those word-of-the-day calendars, entitled "Forgotten English." There are a bunch of winners, but January 1 was a word that immediately entered my personal lexicon. The word was "scurryfunge."
SCURRYFUNGE: A hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor and the time she knocks on the door.
I don't know how I existed before I learned this word, because I use it ALL OF THE TIME. I've taken some liberties and now use it as both a noun ("I just did a quick scurryfunge") and a verb ("I didn't actually clean, I just scurryfunged a little.")
Once I got off the phone with Rog, it was go-time. The level of scurryfunging was affected by several factors. There were the "HOLY CRAP GET GOING!!!" factors, which were:
- Roger and his wife have never seen my house before so I wanted it to look nice.
- The Peters are notoriously tidy and eagle-eyed.
- The amount of time available was limited because I had a show opening that night so I couldn't lollygag, and additionally, they were at the Como Park Zoo, which is just a hop and a skip from my house.
These were balanced by the "Calm the heck down and make yourself a cup of tea first" factors, which were:
- On the Peters continuum, Rog is pretty easy-going, and both he and his wife have teenagers, so presumably they're used to a little mess.
- I'm genetically a Peters too, so my house lives in a pretty decent state of visitor-readiness most of the time.
- I hadn't had time to go to the grocery store in a while, but while I was trying to make meals for myself out of half-cup of sauerkraut and a slice of colby cheese, I pretty much always have baking staples on hand. And let's face it, you can distract people from almost anything with a freshly-baked coffee cake.
But nevertheless, I'm a human who lives in the world, and not a picture who lives in a magazine. So for those of you who keep a folder of cleaning tips (no? just me?), here are:
MELANIE'S STEPS TO A PERFECT SCURRYFUNGE
- Take out the compost, the recycling, and the trash. It takes two minutes, but if you're like me, you wait until everything is full to overflowing because you are A) environmentally conscious and saving bags, and B) lazy. So take 'em outside now. Especially important if your bags contain things like onion peels and lady business. Get 'em gone. And even if your garbage was scent-free, open a window for 15 minutes. Fresh air smells better than anything. Even if it's Minnesota and 15 below, it's worth it.
- Sprinkle some baking soda in the toilet and give it a quick swish. Your guests WILL need to use it, and that's something you REALLY don't want them to see dirty.
- Grab a dishcloth (not the cutesy kind that doesn't actually absorb anything, but the real old-school flour sack kind) and wipe down all of your sink hardware: faucets, handles, anything chrome. You don't even need soap. It won't actually BE clean, but it'll sparkle like new, and you'd be shocked what a difference that makes. While you're at it, make sure there's enough toilet paper, and put out a clean hand towel. Use the old one to give the World's Quickest Dusting to whatever room you think your guests will be in the most.
- Deal with the floor. There's no time to mop or vacuum, but just give it a quick runaround with a Swiffer, or a microfiber cloth, or an old sock, to pull up the dust and hair that always gathers by the baseboards. You might not notice it now, but when the light changes and the sun comes out, it's like God is taking a spotlight to your dust-bunnies.
- And now the big one: DE-CLUTTER! No matter who you are, you are going to have some piles of stuff laying around...grab all that crap and dump it in your laundry basket and shut the closet door. Is it ideal? Of course not. But you got it temporarily out of the way, and that's what counts. While Roger and Melisa were happily eating coffee cake in the living room, they had no idea that silently hiding in my laundry basket were a stack of library books, quilting squares from my grandma, piles of 1099s and W-2s, a folder labeled "Lists", another folder labeled "Things That Would Be Fun to Try", and a vegetable spiralizer.
- Give your whole place a once-over. This is real big-picture stuff. Now is not the time to realize you'd meant to repaint the kitchen. Now is the time to notice there's a giant spiderweb in the dining room, or some guy's underwear next to your bed. You know. That kind of stuff.
- Make sure you look moderately acceptable, or are at least wearing pants.
- Come up with a snack. THIS IS KEY. Maybe you don't have the time, ingredients, or inclination to make a coffee cake at the drop of a hat, but if you scoop the dregs of your jam jar into a dish and set it on a tray with some crackers and cheese, suddenly it looks fancy and on-purpose It doesn't take much to impress most people. I've always wanted to be like my Great-Aunt Frieda, who once managed to make homemade fried chicken AND apple pie between the time my family called her and the time we arrived on her doorstep, but that's next-level. Store bought cookies and a glass of milk are perfectly respectable. Or a bowl of celery and carrot sticks with some hummus. Or some leftover Halloween candy in a pretty dish. Or just make a pot of coffee. If all you have is water, put it in a pitcher with some ice, and it's still fancier than what most people have at home. The point is to offer something. Whatever you offer says "Hey! I'm glad you stopped by!" and "Don't look in the closet!". Folks will appreciate the sentiment, even if they pick all the pecans out of your freshly-baked coffee cake (Roger.)
Because that's the point, right? People aren't inviting themselves over to judge your housekeeping, (well, maybe sometimes just a little, if they're a Peters) but really, they just want to see you. My mom always laments that people don't "just stop by" anymore, they way they did when she was a kid. Mind you, she also complains about having to scurryfunge when they do stop by, but she's still right. She was a kid in the 1950s, in a tiny town in Iowa, with no TV and 8.6 million cousins within a two-mile radius. Most of us don't live like that anymore. We live in a magical world of technology, where we can contact almost anyone we've ever known, anywhere in the world, in a second, but we don't actually spend a ton of time together. I'm guilty of it too. I've been known to text back and forth with my closest friends for 2 months just trying to come up with a half-hour slot where we can meet at coffee shop and then rush back to our lives.
Maybe that's why I like the word scurryfunge so much. It indicates that people might, on a whim, decide they could go for a little human contact. And those people aren't going to remember that there were smudges on the bathroom mirror and the lawn needed mowing; they'll remember that we actually got to see each other. So come on over, friends; I'll make cake. In the meantime, if you'll excuse me, I have to go take the spiralizer out of my laundry basket.
