I will be the first to admit that I lead a cluttered--though creative--life.

I grew up surrounded by chaos, both physical and mental, and the apple never fell far from the tree. While I pride myself on the fact that I can usually find both my cell phone and my car keys before leaving the house, that's very  much the extent of it. The fact weighs on my self-esteem, a diffuse cloud of reprobation invading the edges of my working mind, as well as the piles of paper on the grand piano...and the dining room table...and the pool table.

Chaos appears to be my comfort zone, and where there is none, I've certainly been justifiably accused of creating it.  Or perhaps its more of a territoriality thing. The way I'd clean the house before the kids came home from college, to greet them with some uncharacteristic tidiness as a sign of affection. The tidiness would get blown to smithereens as soon as the first dufflebags and assorted detritus of travel made it to the top of the stairs and got dumped there. I'd look around at the spread of their things, and think, "they're just marking their territory." Thank god they weren't taking after the cat.

After twenty eight years in the same house, with four children who have grown from infancy to adulthood there, I have sentimentally saved a LOT. Sketches going back to pre-school. School papers. Christmas tree ornaments dating back to third grade. Ceramic bowls, cups, fruit. Mother's Day cards. And that's just the stuff relating to the kids.  I took a look in a deep desk drawer the other day and found canceled checks from an account I had thirty years ago. I think they can finally go in the "burn pile." 

I do occasionally make a run at making things tidier, more open, more user friendly. This is typically a herculean task, the type of which I wrote about in Garage Archeology

I have no shortage of encouragement on this quest to be a better, neater person. Judy, one of my very BFFs, is wonderfully organized (as a nurse whose patients have their lives depend on her competence should be!!). Her frequent mantra is that if I haven't used it in six months, I can safely pitch it out. She has come to my rescue on several occasions when I've scheduled big family parties but run out of time to do all the cooking AND make the place presentable. She will wisk into my living room, which I have regarded with a state of mental paralysis and horror, and dust, and stack, and artistically place things in different locactions and when she is done, the room looks "normal" and temporarily inviting, with all seats clear for sitting. It has sometimes taken me months to locate things that she has reorganized in her zeal, but for the party, it would be perfect.

The man in my life, as well, does his best to nudge me along on the theory that my life will be so much easier if I am not navigating around piles of junk mail and things that could be recycled. The seventeen years he spent in the Air Force drilled a sense of order and spare surroundings into him, and he sets a wonderful example. Periodically he has come in like a tornado and overhauled a portion of my cluttered life into remarkably sane example of organization--the garage, for example. My desktop workspace for another. I hold my breath when these projects are done and maintain the order for, say, about two weeks...and then familiar patterns begin to slip. He finds it discouraging...but still loves me.

HOWEVER... Once in a while there will be a cosmic flare that will put that "out after six months" rubbish to shame.

I was looking for my passport for a couple of days and not finding it in the dresser drawer where it "always" sits. Turns out it was in the glove compartment of the car, but I didn't know that at the time.  As I ransacked the drawer, I cast a critical eye on some of the things within it, and decided that along with the gift receipts from purchases made ten years earlier and I body shaper I hadn't fit into for about twenty years, I could also finally through out "the flannel bag." This was a pretty little drawstring bag about a foot square that had formed the wrapping for the kind of adorablyand craftily packaged flannel nightshirt that you buy on impulse when you are Christmas shopping and desparate to get done. I think I bought three of them, one for myself and one for each of my daughters. At least ten years ago. I'd held on to it for that long because it was a lovely shade of turquoise crossed with broad black bands and narrow lavender stripes--just like the nightshirt--and because it might some day become useful.

Frustrated by my inability to find the passport, infuriated with myself for maintaining such a chaotic nest, I recalled Judy's admonitions about the six-month limit, and chucked it into the trash under the kitchen sink with just a small pang of regret that I had never found a use for such a soft, pretty thing.

Fast forward a couple of days. Weeks earlier that man in my life had taken it upon himself to bring my best kitchen binoculars home, cleaning them thoroughly and freeing them from years of dust and grime and splashes from the sink. I brought the binoculars home in a little plastic grocery bag and left them there on the table, protected from dust, until I could run to the store and buy something like a quilted tea cozy to protect them on the kitchen counter. That's where I do most of my birdwatching...from the window just above the kitchen sink. 

However, I was getting ready for a road trip, and wanted to bring my bird guide and the binoculars in case I got some time to birdwatch.  What to possibly wrap them in so that they didn't get dirty and scuffed in the car, but would still provide easy access in case a bald eagle briefly flitted into view? There was probably a formal butt-ugly vinyl binocular carrying case somewhere in my possession...and I would most certainly never find it.

Well, well, well.  I'm not too proud to say that the flannel bag was still sitting in the trash in the kitchen. I was a bit behind in carrying out the garbage since banging up a knee and some ribs in a fall a few days before, and there, at my fingertips, was the answer to my prayers.  In pretty turquoise and black and lavender flannel. Which, on Judy's "six months and out" timetable, would have  long decomposed in a landfill about nine years before.

Gosh, it feels so good to be right once in a while...even if it's just by accident! I just knew there had to be a use for that bag.

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