Spring Cleaning

I've been employing slave, aka mother, labor yesterday and today to help me reorganize my house. It is a daunting task. I find that the longer I live the less I want heaping loads of detrious in my house, but the more I have to have it. This is irksome.

So, hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to Target and Marshalls and Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma, everywhere, anywhere, but Wal-Mart, to buy bins and holders for all the junk, that I absolutely must have. It's helped the general look. A little.

The problem goes back to the year I got married. My husband and I had the fortune to find love in college; we had the misfortune to get married the year after college. None of our friends had money, in retrospect, none of our parents friends had money. And, our parents had no money. All in all, we had no money. Neither did anyone we know.

It is said that need is the mother of invention. The frame for our bed doubled as our chest of drawers--boxes of clothes and stuff from college bunched together into a 6x6 foot square. We lived in subsidized apartments with drug dealers, prostitutes and wife beaters. Our next door neighbor had schizophrenia and practiced "spiritual warfare". That and the .45 our other next door neighbor packed kept us "safe", that and the steel door.

All this is to say we started with nothing and we have been building on that flimsy foundation ever since. I was given a wedding shower by my family and my aunt gave me the most useful gift of all--a waste-basket filled with kitchen stuff. But that stuff is nearly sixteen years old now, and ya know, it's a tad worn. My sister-in-law, a former William-Sonoma employee, cluck-clucked her way through the kitchen drawers last week. She is ten years my junior and has a kitchen like Emiril Lagasse, well, on a smaller scale.

It is high time my kitchen clean up and grow up. I am a woman, cut in the 1950s mold, all my pretending to be a post-modern feminist notwithstanding, and it's time I go June Cleaver and get some of the tools of the trade. For psychological and financial, most psychological, reasons, I've resisted getting the proper tools, but the time has come to submit to the inevitable. Everyone has to eat. Or at least look good serving take-out.

And the house needs to get organized. Ugh. I moved two years ago and the facade is acceptable, but behind every closet door, within each cupboard and drawer lurks chaos, and I hate it. My pefectionism makes me wary of giving in to the OCD devil on my shoulder, but I'm going to go Buddhist and embrace the obsessive energy, harness it, use, make it work for me.

The other possibility: I fail to meet my neat-freak expectations and crumble into little quivering pieces of overwhelmed confusion. Nah, the former is a better possibility. How can I be so sure? Not only am I having my mom help me, I'm slowly but inexorably morphing into my mother.

And mom don't do messy.

Spring Cleaning help here.