My mother is a neat and tidy person, as I have said countless times in the past. My mother is the kind of person who is bothered by a leaf out of place on one of her plants and sees "all this crap" wherever she looks in her neat and tidy, organized and uncluttered home.
I am and have never been a neat and tidy person. Neither is Walt (though he is neater and tidier than I am). I am the kind of person who once said to a child, who was looking for an errant sock, "It's on the floor in the living room under the chair. It's been there for a week."
I had seen the sock there and it had registered on my brain as being something out of place, but it never entered my head to actually pick it up and find its owner. I just let it stay there for a week until whoever had lost it asked about it.
The other day, I went to get a leash for one of the dogs, who was going off for a training session and I carefully untangled the leash from among the other leashes and it suddenly occurred to me that the leashes were on a thing that was holding four tennis racquets! My god, nobody in this house has played tennis in literally decades!
There was a time when I took tennis lessons, back in the 1970s when I could still bend over the pick up a tennis ball. I think the kids may have played tennis a time or two around that decade, but certainly the racquets have not been touched since then. They have become one of those things that somewhere in my brain I know are there but it just never occurs to me that they might have become superfluous!
Aquarians are weird people. I read this one time and I recognized that it is me to a "T" -- We are the kind of people who can let a sock lie under a chair for a week, or tennis racquets hang unused in a closet for years, and never think twice about it, but then some sort of switch will be turned on and we go through a brief frenzy of "cleaning up."
As a child, Karen and I shared a cupboard where all of our games were stored. The thing was an unholy mess most of the time, but every so often--probably at longer and longer intervals--things would just hit me and I'd go through a cleaning frenzy and straighten the whole thing up.
Now I have a whole house in the condition of that one small cupboard, but the tennis racquets clicked on that little switch and I set about doing a bit of tossing things out today. It helped that I had to move the stacks of books sitting on the table between our two recliners because Emmy discovered a love of chewing books. There were literally NO shelves (or even flat surfaces) to put these books, so they have been living on the kitchen table for a week and Walt and I peek over them during dinner. I decided that it was time to do some book culling and send some stuff off to the SCPA Thrift shop.
I found a big box and first put in the tennis racquets. Then to the harder part--finding books with which I felt I could part. It was easy getting rid of "Israel, My Beloved," which someone had given to me and which I discovered did not grab me at all, but there were lots and lots of books that I still feel I am "going to read someday," even though most of my reading these days is done either on the Kindle app or as an audio book.
Note: NOTHING piled on and in danger of
falling off the TV set
Midway through the project, the shelves were starting to look--omigawd--organized. but I came across a book I'd forgotten. Alan Alda's latest book, which appears to be an annotated copy of every speech he's ever given at every commencement ceremony at which he was invited to speak. Not quite up to his first book, "Never have your Dog Stuffed..." which was quite warm, funny and charming.
I was ready to take a break, so I settled under two dogs, taught Emmy the meaning of "NO!" when she tried to devour my book as I read, and read several chapters of it. Trying to decide if I'm going to finish it. There is an air of pomposity about it, but also that disarming self-effacement that we've seen in Alda throughout his career. I'm still trying to decide.
The problem with these Aquarian bursts of organization is that they rarely last long enough to actually achieve organization and so I sit here this evening, energy and incentive gone, surrounded by a bigger mess than when I started...ahhh...but there are also six bags of books and other stuff in the car waiting to be taken to the SPCA Thrift Shop, so even though it doesn't show, there is progress.
Morning P.S.: It's gone! It's gone! It's gone! It's all at the thrift store. Now to hope for another of those bursts of organization before I lose what momentum I achieved yesterday.
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