Suzanne Perez Tobias: Here’s to ‘scruffy hospitality’

I didn’t have time to even sweep dog hair off the entryway floor before a crew of teenagers descended on my home recently.

My son invited them. Sort of.

The group had planned to hang out at our neighborhood pool, but then Jack had to work a few hours somewhere else and his friends couldn’t stay at the pool. Teen-boy planning being what it is – nonexistent – they all accompanied Jack to work and then back to our house, with little warning, for an impromptu hangout.

“But our house is a wreck,” I told Jack as the boys loaded into my car. “We don’t even have snacks or drinks.”

“We’ll order pizza,” one of the boys offered.

“Do you have water?” asked another.

“It’ll be fine,” Jack said.

It was, but not before I spent too much time fretting over the state of our house – the clutter on the kitchen table, the dirty pots on the stove, the toothpaste Jackson Pollock in the bathroom sink.

Those boys didn’t care.

Neither did a friend of my daughter’s who visited our home not long after. She gleefully baked brownies with Hannah, complimented the vase of pink hydrangea blossoms on the table and ignored the piles of mail and newspapers around it.

Turns out, we practice “scruffy hospitality.” And we need to do it more often.

In a recent article for the Mother Nature Network, Robin Shreeves described a couple she knows who frequently open their home as-is to friends and neighbors. They gather in the kitchen on mismatched bar stools or around the backyard chiminea, eating odds and ends of foods from one another’s fridges.

“This kitchen and deck won’t be featured in Better Homes and Gardens anytime soon, but maybe they should be,” Shreeves writes. “They are two of the most hospitable spaces I know.”

She pointed to a sermon and subsequent blog post by the Rev. Jack King, an Anglican priest from Knoxville, Tenn., who sings the praises of “scruffy hospitality” – the practice of inviting friends into your home without a days-long deep cleaning of the entire house.

“Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than the impression your home or lawn makes. If we only share meals with friends when we’re excellent, we aren’t truly sharing life together,” King writes.

“Don’t allow a to-do list to disqualify you from an evening with people you’re called to love in friendship. Scheduling is hard enough in our world. … We tell our guests ‘come as you are,’ perhaps we should tell ourselves ‘host as you are.’ ”

Reading those words just days after my children’s impromptu gatherings, I felt guilty for not having more of my own. What’s keeping me from inviting a friend over for a bowl of soup when I have a big pot burbling on the stove? Or to watch a movie and munch microwave popcorn?

Will they actually care about the clutter or the dust? Will they even notice it? Or would they just be content, as I would, to share a meal and authentic conversation?

My house doesn’t look like a magazine or Pinterest board and probably never will. But maybe we should value togetherness over tidiness.

As my children and their buddies taught me, true friends don’t mind when things are a little scruffy.

This story was originally published July 1, 2016 at 4:45 PM with the headline "Suzanne Perez Tobias: Here’s to ‘scruffy hospitality’."