Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Getting organized
It’s day 9 since Jan packed her car and headed for Florida. It’s also very early in the morning. My eyes opened for good at 0400 and here I am, wondering what to write about. Since Jan is not here to keep our house running smoothly I am noticing things that need to be done. Like a pile of laundry that will take at least three loads in our big capacity washer. Like the three bookcases that are crammed with books and ornamental things and who knows what hidden under some suspicious piles.
I’m not sure how to characterize my personality other than to say that I mostly see the forest and miss the trees. That must be why I can walk right by the messy bookcases without a glance, until I’m looking for a book or a magazine that may have found their way to one of the shelves. Even then it doesn’t occur to me that the shelves need to be rearranged into something neater.
On the surface, our house looks pretty clutter free – until you start opening drawers. There are two junk drawers in the kitchen. That is one and a half more than there needs to be. The bathroom counters hold only essential stuff, but try to find anything in the three drawers and two cabinets under the counters. Look under the kitchen sink and find a big array of cleaning supplies, sponges, trash bags, insecticides, dishwasher soap, and other sundries. Every inch of drawer and cupboard spaces in the kitchen and bathroom is taken.
One time I stayed with a friend who had both knees replaced at the same time. In addition to being her nurse and fetch-it girl, one day I asked her permission to organize the storage spaces in her bathroom. I sat on the floor in front of the cabinets – I could do that back then and get up off the floor with a minimum of fuss. Anyway, I opened the cabinet door and started examining the contents. We still laugh about how much stuff I found that had expired sometime in the 1980’s. If she ever comes to my house she could return the favor. Let’s face it, cabinets are designed to hide just how much stuff one human is able to accumulate.
In Jan’s absence I’m clueless about what is where. Despite what I consider to be messy drawers, she can tell me exactly where to find the object that I’m searching. Sometimes I’m looking right at it, or I’ve already been through the drawer and not found it. She will re-direct me, I will look again, and there it is! I remember one of Roseanne Barr’s stand-up routines where she complained about being the only one in her household who could locate stuff. She said her family considered her uterus a homing device.
Then there is the storage area in the parking garage. My assigned parking spot is in front of it. Jan and I are not agreed on whether or not we need the stuff that’s in there. We moved in here in May of 2018. Except for the Christmas stuff, nothing has moved out of there in almost 6 years. I don’t even know what is in some of the boxes. There are three tubs of Christmas stuff that cry out to be cleaned out because we don’t get a real tree anymore. But there are treasures in there from when the kids were little!…I suspect I’m the only one that thinks of the items as treasures.
The least I can do while Jan is gone is address the bookcases. That might be an afternoon’s work and well worth it. What I really need to do is use some of my vacation hours from work, take a week off, and tackle the storage unit and some of the drawers. If anything happened to Jan and me, our children would be responsible for doing just that. That hardly seems fair – they are accumulating their own stuff. It is a humbling feeling to realize that what I consider treasures will one day be annoyances for them as they try to figure out what to keep and what to get rid of.