The Act of Cleaning

The trouble with living alone is that it's always your turn to do the dishes. ~Author Unknown

If the shelves are dusty and the pots don't shine,
it's because I have better things to do with my time.
~Author Unknown

Don't cook. Don't clean. No man will ever make love to a woman because she waxed the linoleum - "My God, the floor's immaculate. Lie down, you hot bitch." ~Joan Rivers
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Many parts of my life right now are up in the air or broken.  Since I can't control them, I am falling back on an old standby, imposing Type-A-ism where I can.  I cleaned out my classroom thoroughly yesterday afternoon, throwing out three trashcans full of old papers and projects, putting away misplaced objects, and generally neatening the accumulated mess of a semester.

Today, I turned my attention to the house. I washed all the bedding, sunned the feather mattress.  I washed all the dogs' blankets and sunned their beds, too.  I did regular laundry, vacuumed, did fixtures, emptied the dishwasher, cleaned up the kitchen, put out the trash, mowed the yard to shred the old pecan leaves and the last of the dead grass, and started working on the endless piles of things inside.  I put away about a million coats and sweaters, countless books, and migrated all my shoes back to my closet.  I threw out tons of junk mail, but I am not done.  I feel better, though.  It does not embarrass me to live here now.  

I wish I could keep my house like this all the time.  It gets sacrificed, though, to other things.  When I come home in the afternoons, I usually am in survival mode with stuff like daily chores.  It's patch and feed and wash what has to be done right then.  I don't like it so much, though.  I wish I could have a more gracious home sometimes. 

Then I look at some of the other things I get to do instead, and I sort of don't worry about it so much.  I think that I really need to clean out some things on a permanent basis over this holiday, though, do a big purge of things I don't use at all.  Simplifying will help me keep everything neater and less stressful.  The more of that I can do in every area of my life right now, the better.