I am a true expert at concealing my mess.
Witness: my dresser drawers. (I know, and yes, it’s extremely difficult to locate anything at all in there.)
Visible clutter makes me nuts – I keep all the surfaces in our house relatively bare and do things like straighten remote controls, fold throw blankets, and position pillows just-so before heading to sleep at night – but something about things being behind doors or in drawers makes me feel like I can pretend that they just don’t exist. In they go, stuff stuff stuff, I’ll deal with it later (I won’t).
Every once in awhile I resolve to neaten my drawers out, and I do, and the neatness lasts exactly up until the next time I’m in a rush and can’t find that exact grey t-shirt I’m looking for, at which point every single item in the drawer ends up in a pile on the floor, only to be stuffed back in all roly-poly before I leave the house so that I don’t have to come home and bear witness to the shame.
Kendrick is sort of the opposite: on a day-to-day basis he’ll happily deposit his socks on the coffee table (seriously: ON the coffee table?!) and pile the (really a lot of) things that he keeps in his pockets sort of wherever, but then occasionally he’ll get on an organizing kick and need to stay up until midnight unpacking a drawer, cleaning everything in it, and then rearranging it just-so. A couple of weeks ago, I heard him sort of banging around in the kitchen late at night and thought about going to help, then decided that I would rather lay in bed and read US Weekly than help color-coordinate hot sauces or whatever it was that he was up to.
But after breakfast the next morning I went to get out some Tupperware for the leftover yogurt, and:
Angels sang.
Now, ordinarily this state of affairs would last about as long as my neat dresser drawers do (let’s say 24 hours), but that photo was taken three weeks ago, and our Tupperware cupboard still looks exactly the same. Because I have discovered a secret, and the secret is this: the teeny-tiny amount of time that you spend putting things away neatly saves about fifty thousand hours of your life that would otherwise be devoted to yelling fits resulting from your inability to find the Tupperware top that matches the Tupperware bottom (where do they go?!).
Anyway, seeing how much of a difference a single organized cabinet could make to my daily routine inspired me to spend a rainy afternoon in the company of our extremely jumbly and overcrowded glassware cabinet.
And:
Angels.
Talk about twenty minutes well-spent. I’m not ready to commit to dealing with the dresser situation quite yet…but: baby steps.
