Tidy Up

Inspirational song: Dirty Life and Times (Warren Zevon)

Nothing like opening up one's house at the last minute to clarify the mind and light a fire under one's butt to clean everything. Until yesterday, no one in our Wednesday group knew where we were meeting or which version of game we were playing. Hearing no other suggestions, I offered mine, knowing full well that I haven't had energy to keep the place up in ages. No time like the present.

I got a call at 7:15 this morning, telling me that my appointment was canceled because the person I was seeing had to attend to a death in the family. There was no arguing that. Not my place to make someone work during a tragedy like that. So I snoozed for another half hour, and got up to throw myself headfirst into cleaning. Starting with laundry and loading the dishwasher felt like easy but productive ways to start, that were also fire and forget. By the time the day was done, I had cleaned the living room, including shampooing the rug, tidied the bathroom, and scrubbed enough of the kitchen that my daughter could make pumpkin soup for the lot of us over here. I rested a lot along the way. I had to stop and start so many times, I compared it to having your car overheat on a lonely highway in the middle of nowhere. You can drive a mile or so, but then you have to pull over on the shoulder to let that beast cool down. Takes forever to get anywhere, bit once it's over there is a huge sense of relief.

I haven't yet donated the brown chair that was my usual perch yet, so by dragging out my craft room chair we had enough comfy space for everyone in the group for the first time since we came up from the basement setup. It won't stay like this long, but it was handy when we needed it.

 Valerie bounced back and forth from being too shy to look at people, to being the star of the show. It's hard to predict what a toddler is going to do at any given moment. She wasn't too shy to come running out fully naked from her bath, when she was supposed to be getting calm and quiet from warm water and fresh jammies. At the same time, she spent almost the entire evening not using any if her words, unless she was with her parents and forgot the rest of us were here.