It’s time to take a peek into the Smuffy’s secret life.  By now, if you’ve kept up with every episode of “Life With Smuffy”, you probably think that he’s all daredevil and that this nature leaves little time for anything other than leaping across steep roofs, shooting the rapids and having heart-stopping encounters with motorized vehicles.

Oh, not so!  There is another side to Smuffy that makes life with him equally as interesting as all the more hair-raising things.  I can’t classify it as his dirty little secret, though. You see, Smuffy is clean.  He’s very clean.

The casual observer may assume that this characteristic wouldn’t cause much of a stir in everyday life. 

Don’t get me wrong – Smuffy is also dirty.  When he is dirty, he is very, very dirty and actually enjoys a good dose of grunge.  Once, on his birthday, we were unable to locate him to remind him that it was time to get ready to go out for the evening.  We finally found in the compost bin.  He hadn’t been able to think of a more enjoyable way of spending his birthday than cleaning it out and, having done so, to sit restfully inside in the ninety-degree heat with compost plastered to every inch of his sweaty body.  It seemed to him the ideal way to pass the time.

To go hunting and smear himself with disgusting stuff that only an amorous 30-point buck would love and then haul home carcasses and attack them with knives comes as natural to him as, well…bathing.  The bright side is that he does a great job of cleaning up the gore.  He should have started a business – “Smuff-Pro – Like it Never Even Happened”.

Then, bathe he does!  When Smuffy is finished being dirty, he is ready to be clean.  Proper soaps become an issue.  Subtle fragrance and texture variances can cause them to get banned from the home.  When they stopped making his favorite bar soap, our world came to a standstill and he still mutters its name with a tremor of nostalgia. 

After boot camp at living with this paradox, I realized I’d married a man who was a complete blending of Grizzly Adams and Felix Unger and each personality would have its high moments.

If Smuffy has a stint at taking over the kitchen, I can always tell.  I find counters sopping wet, towels dripping, the whole room is wet.  He has gotten all things clean – about 15 times.

I can hear you saying, “How fabulous to have a husband so helpful around the house!”  Well, not that I’m going to let you live with Smuffy because he’s mine – all mine – but you might do well to imagine what that really might be like on a moment-by-moment basis.

When we first married, it didn’t take long for me to start feeling much like Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight”.  He’s not only clean – he’s tidy.  Should I lay a book aside to go to the kitchen for a cup of tea, when I returned I’d search madly for the book till I questioned my own sanity and Smuffy asked what was the matter.  “Oh,” he’d explain after hearing my frustration, “I thought you were finished with it so I put it back in the bookshelf.”  The same thing happened with too warm slippers I’d kicked off, a watch that chafed or a hair barrette that pinched.  Everything just vanished the minute I released it from my grasp.  I was compensated somewhat by the fact that he smelled terrific! 

I did my best to explain to Smuffy that laundry doesn’t get “done”.  Laundry is like dishes.  Dishes can be clean, counters shined and things put away and within seconds, someone arrives with a cup or spoon.  Laundry is always but one sock away from the new pile.  Yet, I felt guilty when Smuffy would start up the washing machine because he felt I’d fallen behind.

That is, until the day I discovered his secret.  I’d made a concerted effort one week to get all the laundry done so that when Smuffy was home and doing his basement projects over the weekend there wouldn’t be a single thing peeking out of a basket to torment his delicate sensibilities.  Of course, a sock or two, a towel and a couple of other things were tossed in by Saturday morning, but what was that in the course of life?

As Smuffy began his project day in the basement, I began to hear the usual sounds waft up the stairs.  He likes to enjoy several things at once, so it’s perfectly normal (normal?) to find him down there hacking up a deer, melting wax for homemade candles, mapping out his next woodworking project while listening to the oldies or watching cooking shows all at the same time. 

Suddenly, added to the symphony came the sound of the washing machine.  What on earth?  I went to the basement.

It’s important to stress that Smuffy had never been trained as a launderer.  His mama did all domestic duties for him.  He’d only entered forced servitude when Pookie came along and he needed to help out by doing things that kept me off the stairs.  Though I appreciated the help, the delicates often suffered and I preferred to wash certain things myself.

“What are you washing,” I asked.

“Oh, there was some laundry in one of those baskets over there.”

“But there couldn’t have been more than three or four things.  I got all caught up just so you wouldn’t have to bother with it.”

“Oh, I just thought since I was down here, I may just as well take care of it.”

I stood defeated for a moment, feeling as though all my efforts had backfired somehow and then came the revelation.  I turned my gaze from the empty baskets to the man at the workbench.

“You love it, don’t you?”

Smuffy looked perplexed and gave me a “Huh?”

“You love it!  You didn’t need to do any laundry and you knew it.  You missed it!  While you were working, you were craving the swish-swish of the washing machine and the soapy smell of clean clothes.  You’re doing laundry to enhance your experience!”

Then, I saw it.  The blushed cheek and the darting of the eyes told me that I had discovered the truth – Smuffy had an addiction.

Now, it may seem obvious that a person can be addicted to a lot worse things than laundry, but over time I discovered that Smuffy’s inability to keep his hands off soiled textiles led him down the road toward destruction.

Oh, the mangled bras!  Oh, the scorched elastics!  Oh, the irreversible bleach disasters!  I tried to make a deal with Smuffy.  If he must do laundry, could he please limit himself to his own work clothes so that Pookie and I could manage to have something that survived his efforts?  He’d agree to terms and then, as though they were some sort of irresistible delicacy, sneak those items in with his own and render them rags.  Each time, those puppy-dog brown eyes of his would look into mine and he’d profess to having been certain the item was his.  It was enough to make me wonder if he had more of a secret life that I thought!

Once he managed to get hold of a pair of Pookie’s jeans she’d bought as an older teen – one of those special pair that she’d saved up her own money to buy because they were “the thing”.  Convinced they were his own, he took things a step further this time.  After an especially tough morning at work one day, he came in for lunch grubby and tired.  As he entered the kitchen, I could tell he was disgruntled.

“Dirty job”, he muttered.  “I’m pooped.  And it didn’t help any that these jeans have shrunk or something.  They’re so tight I could barely move, let alone work.”

I glanced at his behind.  There he was, having washed and dried them, stuffed into Pookie’s “cool jeans”, convinced that anything in blue denim must be his.  They were ruined and, considering the structural design of gals’ jeans, I’m surprised parts of him weren’t.  No amount of TLC was going to restore those jeans to something worthy of the brand label he’d been sporting on his tushy all morning as he put them to the working man’s durability test – which they failed.

I told him he’d better buy her another pair and preached him my “Leave Our Clothing Alone” Sermon Number 843.

Pookie took the loss graciously.  He’d been trying to instill in her the need to clean up and tidy up since she was a mere tot.

Once when Pookie was three years old, we returned home after being gone for most of the day.  Smuffy scooped Pookie up under one arm and headed for the bathroom. Being exhausted, I headed straight for the sofa, stretched out and closed my eyes.  As I lay there, I could hear the water running and Smuffy’s monologue as he took advantage of this important teaching moment to give his little one a ten-minute sermonette on how they were washing their faces and hands and why they were washing their faces and hands.  Germs, he explained, were like bugs.  They were nasty, icky little bugs that make you sick.  You could have lots of them all over your hands and they were so tiny that you couldn’t see them, but they were still there.  However, they would take all the warm water and the soap and wash all the invisible bad bugs right down the sink.

Soon after, I heard the approach of little feet and became aware that a little person had arrived and waited next to my head to see if my eyes might pop open.  I tried to keep them closed in hopes that her dolls and toys might lure her into letting me rest a bit longer, but she lingered so patiently that I finally peeped one eye open to find her big blue eyes eager and concerned.

“Did you hear what Daddy said?” she asked, as if there’d been headline news.

Interested to hear her three-year-old version of it, I played along.  “No, what did he say?”

Stamping her little foot, she narrowed her eyes and pinched her lips together.

“Oh!  I wish you did!” came the disappointed whine.  “I didn’t understand a word he said!”

All my weariness of the day washed away with my laughter over the fact that Smuffy’s germ lesson, though well-meaning and thorough, had gone right over her head and quite possibly, down the drain.

One of Smuffy’s finer moments occurred when I was out of town and I still feel a bit cheated that I missed seeing it in person.  This being the first time I’d left Smuffy and Pookie to themselves for more than just overnight, I called every evening to check in.  To my surprise, Pookie answered.  At age six, she was not allowed to take calls yet.  The fact that she answered told me immediately that something might not be quite right.  Where on earth was Smuffy?

“Hello?”

“Hello!  And how are you today?”

“Just fine.”

I strained to hear any background noise.  Things seemed overly quiet somehow.

“Did you have a nice day today?”

“Yes.”

“Did you miss me?”

“Yes.”

“I missed you, too.  Is Daddy there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, can I talk to him.”

“I’ll ask him.  He’s sweeping all the bubbles out the back door.”

“Bubbles?  You have bubbles?”

“We have lots of bubbles.  Daddy’s got the broom.”

Smuffy made it to the phone.  I asked him how he happened to be sweeping bubbles out the back door.

Always having lived by the motto that “more is better” when it comes to soap, he had decided that what our dishwasher needed was a thorough cleaning.  So while it was empty, he’d given it a good dose of liquid dish soap and turned it on.  The entire kitchen had filled with bubbles. He’d been doing his best to get them all out onto the deck where they could ooze through the rails and down the stairs.

The bright side is that this is probably the cleanest our kitchen’s ever been.

Oh, how I wish I’d been there!  I’d have felt just like Doris Day in “The Thrill of it All” (1963).  Her hubby (James Garner) got things clean, too.

Things are not so spit ‘n polished around here these days due to endless remodeling and toddler-keeping, but that, they tell me, won’t last forever.  When the first is complete it will be a huge relief, but the latter will, I’m sure, make me a little sad.

It’ll be interesting to watch little Snookie take cleaning lessons from his Paw-Paw.  This time, I’m recording.

My Life With Smuffy is always exciting.  Read about our Smokin’ Hot Honeymoon.  You’ll find, in Smuffy Takes the Cure that I did try intervention.  Try his river adventures here and here for the white-knuckle type of adventure.  Even on dry land, he tends to get himself into situations, so check that out here.

Are you living with a “cleany”?  Oh, please do share in the comments!