It’s the day before Easter and all is calm. Family members arrived on Thursday for supper and an overnight. More family arrives tomorrow night for supper and a visit. Our home is located at the halfway point, like the stagecoach stops in days past. “Time for a bit of supp’ and a rest before we continue on, folks.” After all, Iowa is in the middle of the country. Sounds like a good research project: locate former stagecoach stops nearby. But for now, I have other work to do.
Today, we convinced the cobs to leave our home and take their webs with them. It’s amazing how many cobwebs suddenly appear in the corners near the ceiling, even in the closets. It was also a good day to stand at the linen closet with a wastebasket handy. The over-the-counter medicines are kept on an eye-level shelf. It’s safe. Our children are grown and the grandchildren are too short to reach the shelf. Today, I located the expiration dates on cold medicine and the like, then pitched them. The oldest date I found was 1999. I must have missed it last time I did this exercise. It was also a good time to toss all the half-empty bottles of hair conditioner. The shampoo is easily used up but the conditioner remains. Thinking I might some day by more shampoo of the same brand, I save the conditioner bottle. My husband won’t use them because they smell “girlie.” I read somewhere you should change your shampoo every six months, so I’m left with different brands of conditioner. Typically, the shampoo and conditioner are in the same size containers. I would be happier purchasing a conditioner half the size of the shampoo bottle.
After my cleaning, the shelf is left with Alka-Seltzer packets and foot lotion. The need for cold medicines for a variety of ages and ouch creams has passed. I appreciate that our days are calmer. It is what we work towards, right?
Showing posts with label cleaning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cleaning. Show all posts
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Today, I watched the television show CLEAN SWEEP. I had heard of the show but had yet to desire to see other peoples’ clutter and the problems accompanying it. The feature was the winner of the Messiest House contest in 2008. Unfortunately, I easily related to the three women living in the house, a mother and her two adult daughters.
Unwanted change can be difficult to accept. Clutter is created when we fill up our lives to replace something or someone. We replace our emptiness through shopping, furniture and other stuff. In one year’s time, my mother’s life underwent several changes:
• She lost her mother to cancer,
• her oldest daughter (my sister) moved from California to Germany (military husband) taking my mother’s only grandchild,
• my other sister, and only other sibling, married and moved hundreds of miles away, and
• I married and moved a couple miles away, same town.
By the end of that year, my parents’ three-bedroom house filled with furniture. You could barely walk around the rooms. Most of the furniture came from my grandmother’s home attached with sentimental value. It was many years before the furniture began to leave the house (to make room for visiting grandchildren).
A few months after my mother died, I moved to another town due to my husband’s job transfer. I welcomed the excuse to remove myself from the memories of a lifetime. Until then, I had always lived in the same town as my parents. The move provided a great opportunity/excuse for my husband and I to declutter. We had previously maintained a home for our blended family of five children. A few times a year we might have all five, plus a daughter-in-law and grandchild. By the time we moved, we only had one permanent, half-a-week child living with us (shared custody). I maintained supplies for bedding for the possible blizzard that would find us all housebound (never happened, although the blizzards did). Donating the bedding to the Goodwill pulled at my heart, but I followed through.
I’m still a packrat when it comes to my office and all the print outs of Internet research to help me with my books. I can’t just keep the files on the computer because computers crash and are unreliable. Paper is forever. That’s what my husband fears.
Unwanted change can be difficult to accept. Clutter is created when we fill up our lives to replace something or someone. We replace our emptiness through shopping, furniture and other stuff. In one year’s time, my mother’s life underwent several changes:
• She lost her mother to cancer,
• her oldest daughter (my sister) moved from California to Germany (military husband) taking my mother’s only grandchild,
• my other sister, and only other sibling, married and moved hundreds of miles away, and
• I married and moved a couple miles away, same town.
By the end of that year, my parents’ three-bedroom house filled with furniture. You could barely walk around the rooms. Most of the furniture came from my grandmother’s home attached with sentimental value. It was many years before the furniture began to leave the house (to make room for visiting grandchildren).
A few months after my mother died, I moved to another town due to my husband’s job transfer. I welcomed the excuse to remove myself from the memories of a lifetime. Until then, I had always lived in the same town as my parents. The move provided a great opportunity/excuse for my husband and I to declutter. We had previously maintained a home for our blended family of five children. A few times a year we might have all five, plus a daughter-in-law and grandchild. By the time we moved, we only had one permanent, half-a-week child living with us (shared custody). I maintained supplies for bedding for the possible blizzard that would find us all housebound (never happened, although the blizzards did). Donating the bedding to the Goodwill pulled at my heart, but I followed through.
I’m still a packrat when it comes to my office and all the print outs of Internet research to help me with my books. I can’t just keep the files on the computer because computers crash and are unreliable. Paper is forever. That’s what my husband fears.
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