The rain continues to fall. This, coupled with a few late shifts at work, has kept me inside, away from the ocean, feeling like my life is just a series of obligations stacked one on top of the next. I do not love it when my calendar has no breathing space.
You know what helps?
In snippets of stolen time here and there, I have been sorting, purging, organizing and putting stuff back where it belongs. I threw papers and magazines into the recycling bin. I cleaned out my pantry. I alphabetized my spices. (I found one tin from 2002. I don’t know how this escaped my previous alphabetizing.) I pulled everything out of a corner kitchen cupboard that I had shoved there in 2011 when we moved into this house.
As I slowly put things in order, my brain feels better.
The disarray will never end, though. I know this. While I’m tidying up one cupboard, a closet is quietly unraveling, turning into a tangle of wire hangers and heap of neglected shoes and piles of dirty-but-not-that-dirty-clothes that I might wear again before I wash them, but who knows? Even if I lived alone, things would still migrate from their assigned cubby.
But for now, at least I can find the turmeric and my kids’ birth certificates. One thing at a time.
(And yes, I do have The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up on my Kindle. I look forward to reading it, but right now I’m in the middle of Diana Nyad’s memoir about swimming from Cuba to Florida. I have a big pile of books to read.)
Actual Unretouched Photo 
I read the tidying up book. It made me laugh just thinking what my house would look like if I emptied everything onto the floor. It MUST be a great book, but I could never do it that way. So I’m picking away at it, one corner at a time…
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