What I read on my summer vacation

My sister-in-law was the first to tout me on Marie Kondo’s best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, as we dried dishes following my mother-in-law’s funeral in April.

It had been a wrenching season. Judy’s cancer raged back in January; the next month, my father entered the hospital with an acute attack of pancreatitis. They died exactly three weeks apart.

Start with your socks

That spring evening, I was desperate for any little rag of comfort. This Japanese writer, my sister-in-law said, advised that socks not be bunched up, with the outer one stretched to sheathe the whole misshapen ball. Instead, Kondo instructed that pairs of socks should be laid flat, then rolled gently, starting from the toes. This allowed them to rest and recuperate after a rough day underfoot.

As soon as we returned from our week of mourning, I dumped all my socks on the bed, popped open the scrunched balls, rerolled them, and set them back in the basket like so many Technicolor cinnamon buns. I even considered arranging them chromatically, but life called: I had to go to work and help my daughter with irregular Spanish verbs and answer 75 condolence notes.

What sparks joy

Still, I wondered what else Kondo had to say. So during our August vacation, a week on a lake in Canada, I breezed through her book. The mantra of Kondo’s minimalist home-organizing philosophy is this: Tidy all at once, not piecemeal, and keep only the items that spark joy.

But what about the kind of disorder that doesn’t readily submit? What about Sweetheart, still grieving her mom while I mourned for my dad; what about the tears that snagged in our throats?

What about Fourteen, who should have been happy because it was summer and there was no homework and we’d remembered to pack the Nutella, but found a reason to sulk at least three times a day? What about the morning when, after a three-mile run past sunny cornfields, I reached to high-five her and she growled, “DON’T. TALK. TO. ME!” before stomping into the house.

Does this teenager spark joy? Um. Not at the moment.

Searing secrets

It helped, a little, to read the next book on my summer stack, The Vacationers by Emma Straub. A family on the verge of implosion — the father has had an affair with an underling; the daughter is bent on losing her virginity; the son, mired in financial muck — decamps to Mallorca, where their secrets emerge in the searing Mediterranean light.

Okay, maybe Fourteen was mercurial, but at least my marriage was loving and intact. At least we were only a little neurotic: me folding my t-shirts, Kondo-style, into perfect thirds and stacking them sideways in the drawer while Sweetheart labored over a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of birds that, to me, all looked alike.

The lake calmed, the lake turned wild. Fourteen agreed to help make pizza, then abandoned the project because the dough stuck to her hands. She vowed to take a vacation from Instagram, but periodically ducked into her bedroom, iPhone pressed to her side. One evening, she suggested we go kayaking, just the two of us, then paddled off in the opposite direction.

While Sweetheart worked her pointless puzzle, I finished The Vacationers and began Julia Pierpont’s Among the Ten Thousand Things. It covered similar turf — marital infidelity, troubled kids—but six shades darker, starting when the husband’s ex-lover sends a box of raw, incriminating emails to the wife, and the 11-year-old daughter finds it.

With literary fiction like this, no wonder two million people want to read about how to roll their socks.

Deep disorder

But there was one more book, the reading-aloud-on-vacation selection that we’d traded back and forth during the ten-hour drive to Canada. It was The Odyssey, a newish translation by Robert Fagles, which made our modern family dysfunctions, fictional and actual, seem pretty tame. While Odysseus journeyed through miles of fantastic chaos — nymphs who threatened to keep him island-bound, a Cyclops who gobbled his crew — the deepest disorder was happening at home.

There, his bereft wife, Penelope, had to fend off suitors who alternately swilled her absent husband’s wine, raided his pantry, and angled for his kingship. She wove and unwove that damned tapestry (and I thought Sweetheart’s puzzle was tedious) while her only son, Telemachus, set off on his own treacherous journey to find the father he barely remembered.

The day we left Lake St. Clair, we got lost on the way to Niagara Falls, and Fourteen yelled at us for being too stubborn to use a GPS. Car-bound in rush-hour traffic outside Toronto, I boogied a little in my seat. “Stop it. You look like a Bobblehead,” Fourteen muttered. It was the nicest thing she’d said to me all day.

Why do we hold on?

The problem with Kondo’s organizing mantra is that joy isn’t the only reason we cling to what we have. Some items — that silver bracelet my father gave me over lunch at El Vez, the turquoise earrings my mother-in-law passed down — ignite longing and sorrow. Others, a tincture of perplexity: What really happened to my estranged artist-uncle, maker of the whimsical print that hangs in our kitchen? That tiny, amber vial of essential oil? Ah, the scent of being 25, dizzied and confused by love.

I want it all: the 64-crayon box crammed with broken stubs of sienna and cornflower, the half-woven tapestry with its tangled threads, even the wrong turn and the rush-hour traffic and the stupid fight about who should have checked the map. I want Fourteen, who grumped down to Niagara Falls for one cursory look — “So it’s a lot of water. Big deal!” — while sipping an iced latte that cost the Canadian equivalent of seven dollars.

Maybe it was the coffee, maybe some developmental blip, but she perked up when we crossed the Rainbow Bridge back to the United States. Our trip hadn’t transfigured us. Our parents were still gone, our hearts still stung. But while Sweetheart slept in the backseat, Fourteen stayed cheerfully awake, DJ-ing a mash-up of Serial podcasts and George Ezra.

We haven’t changed much since ancient Greece. We can rearrange the sad, exhausted socks, but there is no enduring order on the home front. And no matter where our hero ventures, he never stops longing for it: that flawed, familiar Ithaca, the house where love lives, the untidy, life-changing magic of home.