Rethinking “Scruffy Hospitality”

My mom was famous for keeping an immaculate house. If you walked through her front door unannounced, you’d find the carpets clean and the end tables dusted, the sliding glass door to the patio fingerprint-free. A piece of cake or pie was at the ready in the kitchen, but there would be no baking mess in the sink. She was always prepared in case someone dropped by for a visit.

But hidden in the storage compartments of those dusted end tables was a mess: junk mail and old magazines, wedding invitations and birth announcements. In the closet, coats we hadn’t worn for years crowded those we wore every day. In the upstairs cabinet, worn towels and torn sheets slumped against each other in precarious stacks.

My mom never threw anything away. That was a habit my parents shared, a holdover from growing up during the Great Depression. But my mom took her job as a mid-century housewife very seriously, too, and those impulses were always at odds with each other. Instead of acknowledging both, she used her clean house to conceal what she thought of as a shameful mess.

Once I figured that out, it helped me understand why she was always so about fanatical about keeping things clean.

A few days ago, I came across this article on “scruffy hospitality.” I thought I’d found a term that described the difference between my housekeeping style and my mom’s. I don’t hold on to stuff the way she did, but my house won’t win any awards for cleanliness. And most of the time, I really don’t care.

I dust when I think about it. I clean up pet messes as they occur. The truth is, Mike does way more housekeeping than I do. If we know guests are coming, we do a thorough cleaning so everyone will be comfortable. But my house is not company-ready at all times–I’m not trying to hide the mess of my real life from anyone.

That, I think, is the difference between me and my mom. And it’s the heart of scruffy hospitality.

Most of the articles written on this topic focus on the humble homes and mismatched plates of “scruffy” hosts. They argue that a welcoming spirit is more important than an artfully designed dinner table. They claim, as Jack King does, that scruffy hosts are “more interested in quality conversation than the impression your home or lawn makes.”

While I completely agree with all of that, I think scruffy hospitality has much more to do with welcoming people into a home where life is in progress.

You know the kind of home I mean. It’s a place where spills obviously happen, so you don’t have to feel too bad if you accidentally drop something. Where you can see the evidence of years of homework carved into the dinner table, because no one’s trying to hide it with a tablecloth. Where people read, so books are piled in stacks on end tables, not organized on shelves. (At my house, the books outnumber the available inches of shelf space anyway.)

I once went to dinner at a colleague’s home and was greeted by a hand-written sign she’d taped to her front door. Please leave your shoes on the mat, it read. My carpet is white, and I would like to keep it so. We shared an amazing meal that night. She had a gorgeous house with an amazing view of the city. But what I remember most is being very, very conscious of my wine glass. I really didn’t want to spill.

Even as a kid, I was embarrassed when my mom made that same request of my friends. I understood her logic, but the request felt so insulting. It suggested that my friends were unclean, that preserving the condition of her house was more important than their feelings. And my mom must have understood those implications, because she never made the same request of her own friends.

All of this adds up to a “scruffy hospitality” that has more to do with making guests feel safe in your home, no matter what happens. If you knock over a wine glass–well, you’re not the first.  If you track in a few wet leaves or some mud, I won’t freak out. I certainly won’t ask you to take off  your shoes to keep that from happening.

When my mom passed away, it took a 40-yard dumpster to hold the contents of her house–and that was just the stuff that couldn’t be donated or sold. Imagine how much of her life was tucked away in her cabinets and closets. That’s how much of her life my mom was hiding, both from herself and her friends.

Scruffy hospitality allows us to share the wholeness of ourselves. It encourages us to embrace our contradictions, not secret them away. It doesn’t preclude cleaning up for guests, but it eliminates the need to wipe out evidence of our everyday lives. Most importantly, it acknowledges that we can’t be truly welcoming without being honest about what our lives look like when our guests go home.

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