I find that when I’m in cleaning mode, there are certain messes I don’t even see. They’re just a part of my house now.

I see them in other people’s houses, though. Those same things. Everyone who comes into your house sees them but you. These things kind of get a pass every time you clean, but I would say that once a year you should slow down a bit and think about them.

I. The Stuff on the Stairs

These are the things you put on the stairs to go up or down “the next time I take the stairs.”

Or other people can do it. They can tell: If they’re on the top half of the stairs, they’re meant to go down, and if they’re on the bottom half, they’re meant to go up. You can sometimes move the item up by one stair, and then it’s basically where it needs to go. But you don’t. You just don’t see it anymore.

Occasionally you’ll see it, but not while you’re going up the stairs. You might eventually get tired and throw it up the stairs and watch it bounce back down at you.

“It doesn’t want to go up.”

Shoes, specifically.

II. The Things on the Bookshelves

I hate when people store things in front of the seforim. The seforim shelf is supposed to look nice, and instead it’s just stuff.

For example, right now we have several half-drunk water bottles there and if I ask around, they belong to no one. Same for glasses-cleaning cloths, a bottle of honey that our oldest son brought home from his friend’s farm six months ago (and we think he drank straight from the bottle), old esrogim, a gragger our 13-year-old made in kindergarten, all the pieces of paper that he comes home with in his pockets folded a million times about various learning incentive programs, a sukkah decoration that one of our kids made that is too nice to throw out but not waterproof enough for an actual sukkah, and game pieces we found on the floor after we’d put away the games. And all this stuff makes it harder to dust the shelves, which is bad because for some reason seforim give off an incredible amount of dust.

III. The Front of the Fridge

My wife is a big believer in hanging things on the fridge. We hang so many things there that we had to get a second fridge. My wife thinks we got it because we need more food, but that’s just a nice side benefit. Also, our front door is magnetic, which is something our kids discovered when they were little. They used to play on it with their ABC magnets, and when someone knocked, they would run away crying.

So we have three places to hang things. And we use all of them.

A lot of the space is used for invitations,which used to come down eventually. It used to be that when we went to the chasuna, for instance, we would bring the invitation into the car and put the address into the GPS. Nowadays, our phones are our GPS. We walk over to the fridge, type in the address, and walk away. Even if w etook the invitations down, the ones for the weddings we didn’t go to would stay up.

And then we have candle-lighting magnets. Not even all from this year. We also have schedules up for every shul within a 15-minute radius of our house. And various magnetic clips that can’t actually bear any weight; you put something in them and they slide down. We also have any kind of magnetic business card anyone ever gave us, even if it’s for a business we’ll never call. We have a picture of Reb Shayele Kerestirer, which we’re never going to take down, because even if we don’t think we have mice, we never really know. But that picture isn’t really taking up valuable real estate—it actually slid down to the bottom of our front door, where the mice can see it.

Come to think of it, there is almost nothing I mentioned here that a non-Jew would have hanging on their fridge. Unless they do church schedules of all the walkable churches in town in case they have Sunday guests. I guess this is why non-Jews seem to have only one fridge.

IV. Things to Go Outside

This is the biggest offender. We have a massive display of things that have to go out of the house, though few of them actually make it. This includes things that have to go out to the car, such as cloth shopping bags and the new insurance card, which lives in our house for the first three months of every term.

It also includes all the things we have to give to other people. Our Shabbos guests leave our house, and we’re like, “Oh, we were supposed to give them this thing they left here last time! We forgot the entire Shabbos!” And then we send it up with somebody else, which we certainly could have done the entire time.

We also have things that need to go back to stores. Every time one of us goes to those stores, the other one will text them, “You forgot the thing,” and then the other will say, “Oh.”

And then we have keilim that need to go to the mikvah. That’s when we say, “We need a new giant fork! What happened to our old giant fork?” so we buy a new fork, and it lives near the front door until one day we say, “We need a new giant fork.” “Didn’t I buy one? I must not have.” And then you buy another one and put it near the front door and go, “Hey, there’s already one here!”

All these are things you’re blind to, but they’re the first things that guests see when they come into the house. Though maybe not, because if they were, you’d think the guest wouldn’t leave without them.

So maybe we’re okay.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].