I've never been a tidy person. Perhaps it's a reaction to having been forced to clean the house and do the laundry, including ironing, every Saturday when I was growing up. My sister and I were also the dishwashers in our house. (I could only hide in the bathroom after dinner for so long before the rest of the family caught on to that ruse.) My mother said the reason she had children was so we could do all the chores. Ugh!
To make things worse, my older sister was a neat-nik. She not only kept her side of the room clean, she created an Excel spreadsheet of where everything went. And this was years before Excel was even thought of, let alone invented. When I was in middle school, she went to my parents in tears and said they needed to call up E-Z-Way Refuse Service and have them back their truck up to the window to shovel all my junk out of our shared bedroom.
Anyway, I grew up and got various apartments that ranged from hovels to grown-up style abodes. And somehow I managed to keep them fairly tidy, if not pristine. Then I lowered my standard of living by buying a house.
That was 30 years ago. The house has three closets, each 3 feet across by 1 foot deep. When you have no decent storage, there's only one thing to do. Make piles of crap. Fill the attic to the brim. Excavate the basement to throw more crap down there. You get the picture. 30 years of living packed into one small house. Believe me, it's not pretty. Small children can disappear for weeks at a time.
But, there's an up-side. It's paid for. Yes, I'm a home owner who actually owns their own home rather than renting it from the bank.
It may be a crap shack, but it's my crap shack.
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Thanks to my old college friend, Jim Raife, for providing the background photo for this new blog. I kept it on my desktop for about a year, thinking it would make a great writing prompt. When I decided to revamp things, it was an obvious choice for my site's theme. An amazing photo taken by an amazing person!
