Entropy

I love my little house full of old things. Our life may have new "skin" - books, television, clothes, appliances, but we have old bones. The most beloved things, the things that make our house a home, are all old, even the cats.

The house is aging too. We living in a one-room brick schoolhouse, and this time of year, as everything is waking up, things start wandering through. Mostly, our tourists are just pillbugs and spiders and ants, with the occasional wayward mouse. (Mice tend not to spend much time here before deciding that it would be best to move on.) Small spaces between the floorboards allow admittance, as do gaps under the doors and holes in the screens, if there are screens. But the airy openness of our little house, for all its draughts and bugs, isn't something I would trade for the impermeable blister-pack construction of a new home.

Our furniture fits here, too. Hand-me-down chairs from our grandparents with faded, paper-thin upholstery. Piesafes with rusting tins and oil stains. Chests and blanket boxes with age cracks and blistered varnish. Ikea furniture off-gases chemicals, but our furniture seems to exhale, breathing a sort of world-weary sturdiness and peacefulness into the house. Somehow, things wouldn't seem as still and calm with laminated wood and particle board.

New things make me anxious anyway, truth be told. White tennis shoes, shiny new cars, fluffy untrampled rugs - a consumer's dream for most, but for me, just a panic attack waiting to happen. I do my best. I'll spend weeks watching my every step, avoiding close parking spaces, waiting for a cat to cough up a hairball, but I'm always relieved when entropy sets in. Truly, if you spill something on my new rug, I'll be a little disappointed, mostly in myself for allowing it to happen, but then relief sets in. Salt causes rust, people cause messes, life causes death. Of course, I have momentary envy when I see people with blindingly white sneakers, but honestly, I just don't want the responsibility.

Entropy is a comforting theory. Things deteriorating, winding down, aging, disassembling: they're just following the natural order. Trying to prevent this from happening is like trying to prevent John Henry from catching mice. (I can prevent him from eating them, but not from catching them, much to his annoyance and delight.) It is not a failure on my part, but rather a reminder that the world is functioning as it should.

Entropy is anathema to some people, though. They hermetically seal everything they own, agonize over bugs and damp and dust, tilting at the universal windmill of decay. My brother, for instance, loathes imperfection, and its presence in his life causes him endless agony. He purchases something new, and within days, all he's able to see is the tiny nick in the finish. I still remember admiring his new car for the first time. He pointed out an infinitesimal scratch on the hood, and I was both sympathetic and irritated. He sees it as caring for his things. That's just how he is. With each downward spiral, he becomes more and more dissatisfied, frustrated by ruin. Me, I see acceptance in deterioration. With each day, my responsibility as vanguard against damage lessens. Mentally, a scratch on something makes it one less thing I have to worry about. You do what you can, and you accept what you can't change. I see it as reality. That's just how I am.

So, I suppose it makes sense that I'm happy with my old furniture. Everything in our home lost its "showroom floor" quality a long time ago, well before I was born or before my grandparents were born, for that matter. There's no way I can be responsible. Our house has the graffiti of children grown, dead and buried, and in comparison, a scuff on a windowsill is merely the world continuing its work. I am absolved.