| I hate clutter! All kinds of clutter! Clutter to my ears; clutter in my space, clutter in my emotions, and clutter in my life! Having said that, let me define what I am raving about. I am a very organized person in about every aspect of existence. I require my house to be orderly, my closets to be neat and tidy, my cabinets arranged for easy and ready access to what I need when I need it. I also must have the radio, stereo and television modulated so as not to offend my ears. The interior of my car must be clean and shining. And with all that made clear, I am now experiencing an assault on every item in the list! We have as guests for yet another couple of days my husband’s daughter and his twin grandchildren, aged 5-1/2 years. We adore them and cherish them, especially when we remember that Ricky was a victim of ‘shaken baby’ abuse. Ricky was three months old when we learned of this tragic abuse, and he almost didn’t make it to four months of age. He survived with minimal brain damage, but with some, to be sure. Debbie is the leader of the two, and she is always pushing the limits of behavior because she knows that she can get away with it. They came into my very neat home and promptly disordered EVERYTHING in it! I know my passion for neatness has made it very hard to enjoy the company for what they are: Very dear people to my husband and me. Perhaps it’s been too long since we have had little ones in our lives and have become what I cringingly call “SEDANTARY”! Please, God, I never want to be called sedentary! They never pick up after themselves and they leave toys, crumbs, and NOISE everywhere! They are vivacious kids and never move at a normal pace, but rather in a frenetic fashion. We have an 8-/12-year old toy poodle that has cataracts so badly that he can only see peripherally, and those movements threaten him; ergo, he dashes at the twins barking as though they were some foreign intruder about to harm his ‘parents’! When either of the kids opts to sit on my lap, Frosty is immediately on top of them trying to reclaim his place in my lap! It’s hysterically funny on the one hand, but confusing to my sense of order on the other. Ricky and Debbie think that the normal range of voice is at 97 decibels! My ears’ normal desired range is about 30! Frosty also is offended by the height of the noise and is constantly under foot trying to make out what the ruckus is all about. Karen, their opperendus guardiani has equally as strident a voice – where do I know they learned it – and she is constantly shrieking at the twins to calm down! Is that ‘oxymoronic’ behavior, or what! Yet another disruption is my dear husband’s behavior, from which both the twins’ Mom and Auntie learned their behavior. He never picks up after himself, never closes a drawer he opens, never closes a cupboard door. If he takes milk from the ‘fridge or a slice of bread from the loaf for a snack at the breakfast bar, that is where they remain along with his dirtied dishes. I have a 10-gallon crock sitting as a decorative item by his recliner to stow the newspapers after he has finished reading them. They wind up on the floor all around the chair. He wears jogging shoes to his workplace and when he gets home, he slips them off in front of his chair and replaces them with his house slippers. The shoes reside there until he needs them again to wear to work. If we happen to go out to breakfast or some other event, both jogging shoes and slippers reside in front of his chair, later accompanied by the dress shoes until he needs either pair again! When he brushes his teeth, he never puts up his denture glass, comb or bottle of mouthwash. Never does he wipe the white marble counter of splatters and smudgy handprints. So you can see: I have a lot of disorder to contend with, but in the normal course of living, I try to assign a somewhat low priority to reminding him of all those offenses in the name of harmony between the two of us. Trying to find a way to cope with all this disruption – the clutter, the noise, disarray, and frenetic activity, I remind myself of the more important things in my life. These are people whom I treasure in my life and want them to remain there. I try to consider their lives lived away from me, or gone forever, and give a vast amount of latitude, because I know that if they weren’t in my life, I would be less of a person than I am now and that would be more of a total disruption than I could bear. When I think of the loved ones whom I have lost from my life permanently, I ask God to forgive me for letting the CLUTTER I may have caused in their lives take away from the total enjoyment of having them there. I do sorely miss them AND their clutter. I guess what I am trying to say is that no matter how fixed we are in our routines and desires, balanced with the vastly greater good we get from those loved ones near us, we need to just live in the moment for the joy of the moment, and not let anything or anyone take one iota of that precious gift from us; not even ourselves! |
| Clutter, clutter everywhere, and not one spot to think! © Betty Sue Eaton |
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