For the past couple of weeks, we've kept a rather spotless house. Not by choice, mind you. We've had to. Because of The Showings. And it's getting old, this incessant cleaning up after ourselves. We take a shower and immediately dry the tub with a towel so as not to leave any unsightly watermarks. Same goes for using the sinks. At night, we behave somewhat like normal people, leaving our bags on the sofa, or our clothes on the bedroom floor, or—gasp!—our toothbrushes on the bathroom sink. Then in the morning we hide everything and dress it all up again. Bed made. Clothes put in their proper, but still entirely temporary, locations. Decorative kitchen towel and area rug put back in their assigned, most photogenic, locations. The hand towels hanging on the bathroom rack stay clean because we never use them.

All of this tidying up has its benefits. I mean, it's kind of nice coming home to a clean house each day. It sort of makes you feel like you're walking into a Pottery Barn catalogue. But there are also some serious drawbacks. For one thing, I'm a slow-morning-routine type of guy. So when you add "cleaning and staging the house" to an already full AM docket of showering, big breakfast, a couple of cups of coffee, an hour of NPR, and sometimes a little plant-watering—well, you're looking at just over two hours prep time before you can reasonably get out the door.

I long for the days when I could just leave everything as it was and go. And we're not talking about anything that terrible here. I mean, we're not normally slobs or anything. But come on, it's normal to leave a shirt carelessly strewn on the dining room table now and then, isn't it? Or a dish or two in the sink. Or, I don't know, your underwear hanging from the living room lamp shade. I mean, that's normal, isn't it? Well, not anymore. It's all got to be put away, brother. Things have got to be tidy before we leave. Because, who knows, we may have a Showing.

And that word—Showing—has never held such high esteem in our hearts and minds. Was there a Showing today? Do you think there will be any Showings? The only other word that trumps it right now is Offer. But we only whisper that one quietly to ourselves in the cover of darkness, when only the cats of our neighborhood creep softly on the sidewalks outside our bedroom window. It's a word to treat with great reverence and respect. In fact, I think I may have violated some real-estate voodoo by even mentioning it here. Shit. Please forget I said anything.

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