Beech Tree News Network

Wouldn’t you think that if you start in October getting your house ready for the holidays that by Thanksgiving, you’d have achieved that goal?  Yeah, me too, and we’d both be wrong.  Even taking into account that Garey and I are old, retired people, it would still seem like an attainable goal.  Aside from the fact that we are both easily distracted, I don’t know what happened, but there we were, the weekend before Thanksgiving, in the throes of holiday housecleaning.

Probably the biggest problem is that I live with way too much disorganization during the rest of the year.  This is due to no one’s fault, but my own.  The toaster oven I placed in a wooden chair in the living room, on my way to a storage room that I never reached, had now become part of the furniture.  A stack of cardboard boxes had accumulated in the corner, waiting to be taken to Alabama in order to box up more stuff for Garey’s mom’s estate sale.  A battery charger with battery belonging to my weed whacker was on the floor behind the rocking chair.  The coffee table was nearly sagging under the weight of outdated magazines, and the small side table was now home to several Amazon boxes, containing Christmas gifts.  That was just the living room.

Garey took on the dust, sweep, mop challenge, which is what it took to get me motivated enough to start putting the things that were out of place into their rightful place.  I always start with good intentions.  I put the spool of black thread that I had left on the end table, back with its friends in the thread box.  The fingernail clippers were returned to the bathroom drawer, and the markers and coloring book were returned to the storage ottoman.  

A couple of hours into the sorting, however, things started to go awry.  I quickly became overwhelmed by all the Sportsman’s Guide magazines.  “How many of these magazines does one man need?” I asked myself.  Just one, I decided.  The fall master guide should have a compilation of all the others.  The decision to toss the rest of the Sportsman’s Guides didn’t seem like a mistake at the time.  The mistake will come to light around February, I envisioned, when Garey asks, “Where’s that Sportsman’s Guide with the man with the dog and the gun on the cover?  There’s something in that one that’s being discontinued, and I want to order it.”  I dug the other Sportsman’s Guides out of the trash and returned them to the coffee table. 

I reached the point in the organizing process where I started grouping disparate items and putting them in places where they were hidden from sight, but didn’t necessarily belong.  If I put these items in reasonable places, it wouldn’t present such a problem down the road when I’m trying to locate them, but I rarely use reason when I’m hiding things.  I once lost my laminator for a year and a half, then finally found it under the cedar closet in the sewing room.  I put a bottle of joint supplements in my summer pajama drawer and didn’t find it till May, when the weather called for putting away the flannels. 

It comforts me when my friends tell me they do the same thing around the holidays.  One of my friends makes Italian Cream cakes and gives them as Christmas gifts.  One year, she ran out of storage space in her kitchen, so she put one in her dining room hutch.  She gave the kitchen cakes away, but she forgot about the one in her hutch until around Valentine’s Day.  It had grown quite an impressive culture of mold by that time.   

About March, of this next year, I will start asking myself, “What happened to…?” or “Didn’t I have a…?”

“I must have given that to Goodwill,” I will tell myself, but more than likely, it will still be in this house.  I just haven’t found the most unlikely place it could be hiding.

“I’ll do better next year,” I always tell myself.  You know what?  I might…if I start in July.