Where is Mary Poppins when you need her? Saturday morning, after two weeks of using my home as a “flop house”, I was determined to bring order to the many small piles of unrelated items covering surface tops throughout the house. I really could have used a cheery helper who, instead of pulling things out of a carpet bag, crammed them in and made them disappear. I know tidying up shouldn’t be such a tough job, but when your mind is wired like mine, it is a major cardio event.
I started in our bathroom and worked my way out. The bathroom was pretty straight-forward not much to write home about. My ADD kicked in when I started clearing off the top of my dresser. It had become a clearing house for things that had entered our room but needed to go somewhere else. There was a folded dish cloth and towel left over from a load of wash I did for the church, a leaflet on exercises for positional vertigo I need to return to Angela, some loose change, a recipe a friend gave me that needed to make its way to the kitchen, a bottle of shoe stretcher, a pen and more stuff I can’t remember.
The cardio kicked in as I took each one of these things in hand and returned them to their proper place, which was usually downstairs. Once I got down the stairs, I usually discovered something that distracted me and me in another direction. Each item I touched sparked a memory of where it came from, what I was doing the day I dropped in its current location. Many times I entered into a decision process to discern where the proper resting place for the thing would be. These actions compounded into so many trips up and down the stairs that if my travels were mapped with dotted lines it would look like one of the cartoons in the “Family Circus”. The end result could have been healthy work-out except each time I walked by the coffee table in the living room, I took some of Mary’s advice and grabbed a couple of jelly beans from the candy bowl. She was right, “a spoon full of sugar” helps a lot!
Unfortunately, my oomph ran out before all the piles were gone. While the majority of the house had been cleaned, vacuumed and dusted, and some of the piles tidied into neater piles, there was still what seemed like a long way to go. In the end, I decided to call it a day and have some lunch and take a rest. As much as I would love to have a house that looked like the magazines; where the surfaces are devoid of anything except coordinated décor, my life just doesn’t work that way.
I guess my neat piles of unrelated stuff are a metaphor for my view on life. I really have little control over what enters it. My house is bombarded daily by junk mail, newspapers and magazines, church bulletins, leaflets from local venues, coupons, ticket stubs, sale ads etc., etc., etc. Yet I attempt to bring order to the chaos, sort out and stash the important stuff while trashing the junk. Most importantly, I try not to let it overwhelm me. So, when I’ve given it my all, and the majority of the stuff is made orderly, a couple of jelly beans and a nice long sit on the couch with my feet propped on the coffee table is just plain Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious !
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