Pantry after badly needed clean-up, February 2013

I have felt such a need to purge and clear out lately. What is this, some kind of early-early spring cleaning clock?

I think it’s more that the build up over the 4 and a half years we’ve lived in this house has suddenly… well, built up. To the point where, when I peek into certain closets, I feel like an ant contemplating the scale of a skyscraper, and so I close the curtain on it and go about my business. No, it’s not that bad. The piles of paper and paper and bedding and more paper and things I’d like to sell on Craigslist but haven’t moved despite posting them twice and paper and more paper – well, they’re not towering skyscrapers. They’re more like the slums that grow up out of cities, cardboard and tin boxes clinging to the side of a steep hillside, and you worry that, if you reach into the middle and pull out that box of new checks, the whole thing will come tumbling down.

That’s how I was feeling at the beginning of this year. And this feeling of total overwhelm I was getting multiple times a day really didn’t go with living the possibilities of resilience, being connected and powerful expression.

There’s nothing that takes away my power faster than not being able to find something that I’m SURE I should be able to find. Just ask my husband. The other night, I was working late and he came into the living room, looked at me a moment and said, “If I ask you if you know where something is, and you don’t know, will you be able to keep yourself from obsessing about it for the next 2 hours?”

He knows me.

A few weeks ago, after dropping the antibiotic bomb on myself, I thought that if I could spend a week just clearing and organizing my house, sleeping, and soaking in hot water, I’d feel much better.

The soaking in hot water part didn’t happen as much as I’d like it to (I have a recurrent dream there’s a hot tub on our deck), and let’s not talk about sleep just now, but the clearing out the house project is going – in fits and starts – but going! Two weekends ago, I organized the pantry, and now I’m no longer afraid to cook. For my birthday present in early January, my mother-in-law came and helped me tackle several of the most problematic and chaotic closets. And now I can tell Elan to go get himself some crayons without risking every art supply we own falling on his head.

The next thing is tackling the gigantic pile of 2-year-old “Very Important Documents” that’s currently overflowing a sharp-edged metal bowl on the floor next to my bed, threatening to trip or hobble me every time I have to leap out of bed in the middle of the night and dash down the hall to the kids’ rooms.

It’s all about safety around here.