“She’ll be here at 2 p.m. tomorrow,” he smiles, as he walks into another room to pull out and display his instruments for her to play. It’s 7 p.m. on a Thursday night, and I’m just home after a long day of meetings and teaching. I scan the middle of the living room as she might see it. My ceramic Christmas trees and felt elves sit jauntily together on our bookcases (it’s February). Mail and books are piled on every flat table-like surface in the living and dining rooms. We’ve pulled all of the books from bookshelves in the room where they will be meeting, and they sit haphazardly on the floor waiting to be shelved. The kitchen hasn’t fared any better; pots from homemade Bolognese sauce soak in the sink and dirty dishes are waiting to be washed.

In other words, there simply isn’t enough closet space to shove all of detritus into hiding before our guest comes.

“Oh, and she’s bringing her husband,” Marc adds. Of course she is, I think.

Maybe you’re in the same place I am? Some kind of post-holiday miasma where all of the things I was supposed to do in January have yet to come to fruition. I haven’t even managed to put away holiday decorations yet. At this point, it feels like I should just leave them up because Christmas is only 10 months away.

I think of all the funny memes about cleaning like spraying cleaning products in the air before guests arrive and, although I’m tempted, I do finally bring some order to the piles. It doesn’t take as long as I thought it would and perhaps this is where I often fail in housekeeping: the idea of doing it is worse than actually doing it.

At one point in my life, I tore monthly chore and cleaning lists out of Martha Stewart’s Living magazine. My aspirations were always slightly unobtainable, and I remember more than once reminding myself that Martha had groundskeepers when she wrote “till the garden” in her March calendar.

My grandmother used to have a simple morning routine that I remember well. Open one window just a crack in each room, even in the winter. Take a rag and dust every surface. Sweep the kitchen floor. Wash, dry and store the dishes while coffee percolated on the stove. Her house always smelled of lemons. My mother’s routine is almost the same, sans open windows. It seems that I should have been able to put these routines into play, and yet, I can’t. We’ve had sporadic success over the years with chore lists and rotating duties, but the problem for both my husband and me remains the same: there are just so many damn books to read. My day starts with rolling over to pick up a book to read for three minutes (or is it three hours?) until the coffee maker’s automatic timer starts the brew cycle. From there, writing, grading, reading some more, meetings, teaching. At night, I flop on my chair, home at last, and…read.

I have no one to blame but myself in all of this. I guess the problem comes down to that pesky feeling of “should.” As in “I should be cleaning,” or “I should be doing something else.” But it seems that it’s taken me a good 40 years to shake off those “should” feelings, so I don’t want to backtrack and return to should-ing myself. My new motto is often attributed to Phyllis Diller: housework never killed anyone, but why take a chance?

Which brings me to the post-holiday miasma. Is it because it keeps snowing? Or because it’s been darker than usual? Is it because I’ve been binge-watching the apocalyptic “The Last of Us” on HBO Max? You should see the state of some of those houses. Makes me feel a lot better about the pile of laundry still on my floor.

The next day, I solve my problem in a new and creative way. I leave the house at 1:30 p.m. before the composer and her husband arrive. I take myself to Bookman’s, drink some tea, and return home later that afternoon with more books. I walk into the room and see a tidy display of my husband’s instruments, seemingly untouched.

“Didn’t she play anything?” I ask, admiring the still neat rows.

“Oh, yeah. We played everything. It was fun!” Marc gushes as he fills me in on his afternoon. I’m glad they had fun and my worries over our not-so-clean house dissipate.

Two weeks later, I notice the instruments, still neatly displayed where he left them, waiting to be put away. That will happen sometime soon. Hopefully before Christmas. In the meantime, I have some new books to read.