Clutter

Clutter, combined with a fast moving brain are the banes of my existence. My father used to joke that he could tell in what order I’d visited each of the rooms of our house. He didn’t need a bloodhound, he just had to follow the somewhat unorganized trial I created and the amount of personal items I left behind.

This has included jeans on a chair from the previous night, pillow cases on the floor near the laundry room, laundry soap on top of the washing mashing without its cover, an open cupboard with two rejected glasses, and ice cubes that escaped the aforementioned glasses on the floor making little puddle trails. You get the picture.

The trail of breadcrumbs (literally and figuratively) was very similar to the boy Billy in the comic “The Family Circus.” The only thing I was missing was the plotted black line detailing my adventures throughout the house.

The clutter resulted from being too busy to stop, think, and put things away as I raced through each exciting joyful fabulous day wanting to take it all in, and quickly. Of course it also results from having too many jeans and yes mainly from genes.

I like to say I come by it naturally since my mom’s side of the family carries the deadly paper gene. Anything, yes anything remotely connected to paper must be saved. Books and magazines are a the top of the list but all of us in the chain of succession have to fight the urge to keep stacks of left-over paper plates, newspaper columns written by my grandfather, stories written by grandmother and of course my own musings.

The good news is we who thrive in clutter have a love-hate relationship with it. It drives everyone crazy, but we can almost always find what we need and know where it is within the clutter. We love it when someone helps us dig out but it’s always bittersweet because we know it will be impossible to keep it that way, so the joy is fleeting.

There are two really good reasons to have clutter (i.e. too much stuff). First my aunt is the one you want to be stranded on a desert island with, because the cast of Lost could have survived with the food and medicine in her bag for several weeks. Second, if I ever got lost in my house, I would always know someone could follow the trail and find me. Rock on Clutterbugs, rock on!