I was out this morning running errands and having lunch with my mom. When I got home, I read all the comments on the post about the cat, and I had renewed hope. Paul was out on errands too, so I waited impatiently for him to come home so I could go get the cat without having to bring Henry with me. I imagined how I’d come home afterward and do a post that was just a picture of the cat. AND THE CROWD GOES WILD.

We drove to the shelter—and there was a “HOLD” sign on the cat’s cage. I found a worker and asked if holds ever fall through, and she said, “Oh, sure, yes! We can take your name and call you if they don’t come back. Which cat?” When I said the cat’s name, she said, “Oh. Actually, they’re filling out the paperwork right now.” The kids wanted to look at the other cats, so I saw My Cat being taken out in a cat carrier.

So. If I’d gotten back from errands a little earlier, if I hadn’t waited for Paul but had instead just taken Henry with me, if I’d posted my post last night instead of this morning—that cat would be home with me now, and this post would be a picture of him. I am thinking of it this way: that maybe the people who took him (it was a woman in her 40s and a woman in her 60s) NEEDED a cat without claws, but didn’t want to declaw a cat so had been waiting for an already-declawed rescue cat to become available. And now they will take him home and he will be very happy, and we will find another cat later and be GLAD this one fell through, because we will like the other one so much. In any case, it’s happy that cat gets to go home now.

I went to the animal shelter yesterday to drop off some more donation clothes (they have one of those fundraising dumpsters), and while I was there I went in “just to look” at the cats, “just for fun.” My household is a three-cat household with two cats, and so the cat vacuum needs to be filled—but we thought it would be nice to have some two-cat time first, so I haven’t been actively looking. On the other hand, it’s so tempting—like browsing baby name books when you’re not actively trying but you’ve entered the “it would be fine if it happened” time.

So I went in to look, and I found a great cat. Exactly the cat I was looking for. We’d like to STAGGER our cats a bit more this time, so that we don’t have three elderly cats at the same time with all their expenses and problems and stresses and sad dyings, and we have a 2-year-old cat and a 1-year-old cat so we’d like the new cat to be at least 5 years old, and this cat was 7 years old. Which is also pleasing since older cats can be harder to find homes for.

Also, this isn’t at all necessary, but I do ENJOY getting different fur colors each time, so it’s not crucial but a BONUS would be a new kind of fur, and this cat was patches of orange fur and white fur, which we’ve never had.

A lot of times, when I look at the cat and then the little descriptions on the cages, the cat sounds perfect until I get to the part where it says the cat doesn’t get along with other cats, or doesn’t do well with small children—and there are a lot of cats like that at a shelter, because that’s one of the big reasons WHY a cat gets brought to a shelter. But THIS cat’s description said he’s easy-going and gets along great with young children, other cats, and even dogs.

AND, a clincher: it said “He’ll want to sleep on your bed, so be prepared!” I LOVE a cat on the bed at night. And this cat is a nice big solid cat.

Furthermore, the cat was working the pity vote: lots of cats seem like they don’t mind being at the shelter, but this cat looked, as I described him to my mother, “like he just wants to GO HOME,” and my mother agreed completely. (Did I mention she was with me? She was with me, and so was Henry.) He didn’t come to the cage door to pick at it or bonk his head against it like some of the other cats do; he had his head toward the far corner and he looked like he’d lost hope. And yet when I put my hand at the cage bars, he came right over and rubbed his jaw/cheek on my fingers.

I think that cat would be here at our house right now, except for one thing: the description said his front paws were declawed and so he should be an indoors-only cat. And we have two indoor/outdoor cats, and they have a cat door so they can come and go freely, and we have children going in and out all the time so we wouldn’t be able to reasonably expect to be able to contain a cat that WANTED to go out.

So. I went home, without the cat. But I’m feeling sad about the cat. I KNOW I will like other cats just as well, and that if we don’t get THIS cat there will be ANOTHER cat later. And in fact when we get that hypothetical future cat, Hypothetical Future Me will be saying, “Boy, I’m glad we didn’t get that OTHER cat, because then imagine: we wouldn’t have THIS cat!” But right now I still find my mind turning the problem over and over, trying to find a way we could take the cat. Could we TRY to keep him indoors while letting the other two out? No. Could we keep the other two cats exclusively indoors as well? No. CLAW REATTACHMENT SURGERY? No.

IS there any way this could work? I was thinking I might go to the shelter on Sunday (I take Henry and one of the big kids on an outing on Sunday, and the animal shelter is a popular destination), and if the cat is still there I could talk to one of the people who works there about it. I also thought about calling the vet to ask HER. Because the shelter leans very hard toward keeping cats indoors, and what I thought I remembered was that a front-declawed cat COULD go outside, especially if they have a cat door they can run to, because in a pinch they can climb trees with their back claws and just use their front paws for balance? Like, that you wouldn’t declaw an indoor/outdoor cat—but that if the cat were ALREADY declawed, as in this situation, all was not lost on the outdoors thing as long as the back paws still had claws.

It astonishes me again and again the way I can get totally caught up on something, feel all amazed that it is not so hard if I just work on it consistently, feel so good about being caught up, feel so happy viewing daily the results of my labor—and then let it fall right back again because I don’t really want to work on it consistently and/or there are only so many things there’s time in a day to work on consistently and that bag of library books is not going to read itself.

Most recently I’ve done this with the laundry and with the decluttering. I don’t know why I ran out of steam on the decluttering: it felt so good to get the dining room done, and some of the basement done, and then I worked for awhile on Elizabeth’s room—and as soon as Elizabeth’s room was no longer a fire hazard, I lost my oomph. I think I just have a fairly high clutter tolerance, and it takes significant effort to force my tolerance lower. This is probably a trait I should be grateful for rather than trying to fight and change, since I think otherwise I might go mad in this house of cluttermakers.

And the laundry, I find I enjoy it more if there is a feeling of urgency: Rob is wearing HIS LAST PAIR of pants! or whatever. It makes me feel like I’m doing Important Work rather than keeping up with household drudgery no one notices: “Here are two more pairs of clean pants to add to your five pairs of clean pants.” Plus, it goes faster if I can do a whole load of one thing: it’s much faster/easier to fold a whole load of shirts for the two boys who share a room, than it is to fold a load of several shirts, several pairs of pants, several sets of pajamas, a stack of underwear, and a pile of socks, all distributed among four different bureaus.

Last night my mom and dad and my mom’s friend Donna and I tried to figure out who would be next in line for the British throne if Charles died before he was king. You would think there would be a simple and quick “just look it up” kind of answer to this question, but YOU WOULD BE MISTAKEN. We even had Donna call in a lifeline, phoning her trivia-knowledgeable husband to ask him. (To his credit and our amusement, he didn’t act at all surprised about being called at 9:00 at night with a question about British rules of succession. Donna says this kind of thing happens to him all the time.)

To ME, it makes sense that if one of Queen Elizabeth’s children dies before she hands over the crown, she would instead hand it to another of her children. Instead, after about an hour of poring over various sites (none of which agreed with each other), it appears that even though Charles hasn’t yet been crowned, his descendants (I will never spell that word right the first time) are already lined up JUST AS IF HE WERE crowned—so if Charles died, Queen Elizabeth would give the crown to William. (This assumes the verb “give” will ever apply to her relationship to the crown, which I doubt.)

But…why skip the generation? Why not have someone of the exact same “rank” (child of the queen) fill that slot of queen’s heir, instead of skipping over those same-rank people and going a rank lower? It seems like the rule is something like “preference is given to the firstborn AND to the firstborn’s line, over any otherborn or otherborn’s line”—but that doesn’t explain the WHY to me, and also there were spots in the lines of succession we were looking at that didn’t seem to follow this rule. Finally we had to agree that we would just have to wait and see what happened: if Charles DOES die before his mother, THEN we will find out for sure. Until then, it doesn’t matter anyway.

********

Are you going to watch the royal wedding a week from tomorrow? I’m already aware that huge swaths of the population couldn’t care less about it, and a list of who’s NOT watching would be hard to file, so it’s more that I’m wondering who among us has a “yes” reply to this question, and I will assume the rest are “no, this is not among my personal set of interests, just as some of my personal interests are not among yours—and that doesn’t mean that either set of interests is superior to the other.”

I’m hoping to figure out a way to watch it on television AND be on Twitter, because I think that kind of thing is fun. Maybe I’ll see if I can borrow my dad’s laptop. Or…can it be watched on the computer? I don’t know about these things, and it seems boring to research it. Oh! It looks like we can watch it on YouTube? That’s probably what I’ll do, unless it ends up being reallllllllly slow on my computer. Or….I don’t know, how are YOU doing it? And are you having snacks? Because I’m having snacks.

I was talking to Indigo Girl about this on Twitter, and then realized, no, this is something I need to share with THE WORLD: I was at the grocery store this week, and the clerk DIDN’T KNOW WHAT CHOCOLATE CHIPS WERE.

Shall I pause? Do you need a moment?

I was buying quite a pile of bags of them because they were on a good sale (and as an aside, fellow customers: “SOMEONE’S doing a lot of baking!” can be said in a whole range of tones and with a whole range of accompanying facial expressions, and some of them are totally fine and some of them are TOTALLY RUDE AND YOU KNOW IT), and the clerk picked up one bag and turned it over in her hands and said, “What are these? Like, little chocolate candies?”

When I told Paul this story, he wanted to know if I’d been buying an exotic kind of chocolate chip, because some of those really do look like bags of little chocolate candies—but NO, these were regular Nestle Tollhouse Morsels, totally standard, yellow bag. And besides, it’s not like when I said, “…They’re chocolate chips. They’re for…baking?” she said, “Oh, duh, of course! I don’t know where my brain went for a minute there!” Instead she said, “Ohhhh!” in a tone of wonder. And I said, “Yeah. I use them in, like, cookies and muffins.” And she said, “Huh!” like I was telling her a novel way of seasoning asparagus. Then she added, oddly: “I only eat boxed chocolates.” She didn’t ACT like she was putting me on.

Nor did she seem like a recent arrival in this country: I know other countries have different standard baking ingredients, and that if I were to get a job in a grocery store in one of those countries I would likely look very foolish indeed, asking questions about absolutely ordinary items. But while I didn’t go so far as to verify this by examining her birth certificate, I’d say she was 100% standard United States teenager.

So. Anyway. Mystifying.

And speaking of mystifying, another Twitter topic that actually I want to talk longer about and to more people: What is with models in underwear ads looking so SULTRY? I totally get it when it’s underwear being marketed as GIFTS: in that case, I EXPECT the model to be sending the message “Your significant other would TOTALLY look this hot if you bought this fancy get-up, I PROMISE!”

But if it’s regular everyday cotton briefs, I want the model to just look…friendly. The same as she might look in jeans and a t-shirt. Like she’s saying, “Hey, this is a nice deal on the hi-cut cotton kind you like! I like to wear these myself! They’re comfy! And look, it’s a Bonus 4th Pair pack!” It doesn’t seem necessary for her to look like she’s trying to seduce me: _I_ know not to buy them based on how SHE looks in them, and besides, she is not my type.

As Misty pointed out, this problem is just as bad with men. When I’m at Target getting another 5-pack of cottons for Paul, I feel like telling the model on the wrapper to BACK OFF, FRESHY, I am buying these for MY HUSBAND. (Also, I think men look kind of stupid when they’re trying to look sexy.) (I mean, don’t they? They’re all “You know you want me: look how artfully I’ve arranged myself in this budget-friendly 100% cotton!” and I’m all “*trying to repress a snort of laughter while also wincing to think what his mother thinks of this*”.) I’d prefer the guy on the underwear wrapper (do you notice how very carefully I am avoiding the use of the word “package”?) to look like a GOOD FATHER and a NICE HUSBAND. Maybe he could look like someone else’s slightly flirty husband. But THAT’S AS FAR AS IT SHOULD GO.

I have often sung the praises of Freecycle, and I wanted to mention it this week since it’s Earth Day on Friday, and Freecycle is such an excellent way to do the REUSE part of reduce-reuse-recycle—er, and I guess the REDUCE part, too. I guess I’m a little confused about those three words, because they overlap so much. My point is that Freecycle keeps some stuff from being thrown out, and it keeps people from having to purchase some things, and the whole thing is a really good idea and is the kind of practical application of a big theoretical ideal (“We should save the earth!”) that I find very satisfying.

We’ve used it many times to avoid buying something: a crib, when Henry’s broke just six months before we planned to move him out of it; crutches when Rob twisted his ankle and only needed crutches for a few days; a toaster oven when we weren’t sure we’d use or like a toaster oven. We’ve used it to get rid of tons of stuff I felt was too “USEFUL!” to get rid of but didn’t have any urge to try to sell: baby equipment, pieces of furniture, clocks, lamps.

The downside of Freecycle is that you have to deal with people, and people can be unreliable cheeseheads. You’d THINK that if you were giving something to someone for free, something they said they wanted, something where THEY chose a convenient time for THEM to come get it, that they’d come get it. And yet again and again, unbelievably to me, they DON’T come to get it. We post an item as available, and there is a big clamor for it—several people saying “Ooo ooo pick me, pick me!” We choose someone; they say they’ll come the next morning, they are SO excited, they need this SO badly and have NO money. We have a moment of feeling good about the way Freecycle society works: those who have, give! those who need, receive! WHAT A GREAT SYSTEM!

Then the next morning comes and goes, and the item has not been picked up. Evening comes; still nothing. We contact the next person who was dying to have it, and they say they’ll come for it after work the next day. They don’t show up either.

And so on. What…IS this? I can’t figure out the motivation for saying you want something and then not showing up to get it. I understand it when it’s something that costs money: maybe someone acted impulsively and now doesn’t want to spend the money after all. I understand it when it’s “Come by the house later, honey, I have two boxes of junk to unload on you!” But I don’t understand it when it’s “Who wants this for free?” “ME ME ME ME ME!!!” “Okay!” “THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!! *never heard from again*”

I am feeling particularly riled right now, because I am trying to get rid of my maternity clothes. Normally I don’t bother giving away clothes on Freecycle, unless I happen to have a nice tidy group I’m getting rid of all at once; instead, I put them in a donation dumpster at the Humane Society. But plus-size maternity clothes are hard to find, and also I felt much squirrellier at the idea of putting them in a dumpster. So we put them on Freecycle.

MANY REPLIES. We picked the first one, and she said she was so relieved because she couldn’t find plus-sized maternity clothes anywhere, and could she come by this very evening? Yes! No show.

We contacted the second one. Oh, thank goodness, she hadn’t known WHAT she was going to do about clothes! She would be by in the morning. She emailed late morning to say she was having a bad bout of morning sickness and could she come after lunch? No show.

We contacted the third one, who said she couldn’t believe we’d had two no-shows! She’d had a lot of no-shows this week too! But she PROMISED she wouldn’t be a no-show, because she HATES no-shows! She couldn’t understand why people would even DO that! She would come get the clothes the next day. NO SHOW.

It’s frustrating. You might wonder if perhaps the clothes were in crummier shape than I could see with my sentimental eyes, and so maybe people DID show up but then tactfully left when they saw the clothes, and I thought of that too, but the bag was still knotted closed.

I put the clothes in the Humane Society dumpster. It’s no big deal, but that was a lot of fuss for nothing. LUCKILY, this doesn’t happen too often, and usually not more than one no-show per item (three was a record-breaker), or we’d probably stop doing Freecycle: it’s hard to stay motivated to give away your things for nothing if there’s a big hassle involved.

Ever since Paul rearranged our basement shelves into rows, and didn’t allow enough room for my hips in one of the rows, I’ve felt peevish and irritable about our basement storage.

When he “dealt with” the empty boxes he thinks I’m silly for keeping (says the guy who NEVER DOES ANY OF OUR MAILING OF ANY SORT, NOT EVEN GIFTS TO HIS OWN FAMILY, nor does he handle handmedown clothing storage) by tossing them ALL willy-nilly into that too-narrow aisle, making the aisle COMPLETELY INACCESSIBLE even to parts of the body narrower than my hips AND the boxes inaccessible as well, I priced online divorces and realized a cast iron skillet and a shovel were cheaper and faster and could be reused afterward.

Every time I try to get rid of some of our STUFF, I get stopped by that aisle: I can’t even get into it without taking out dozens and dozens of boxes—and doing it sideways. And the boxes were just TOSSED in there, so if you try to get one box, a whole bunch of other boxes tumble down around your ears. And I’m too mad about him making that mess (and it is SO CLASSIC: he will “store things” IN FRONT OF CLOSET DOORS, so every time I see THAT mess I remember all the other, SIMILAR messes) to make myself tackle doing the cleaning up. So I showed HIM: I left it that way for YEARS. More and more boxes accumulated: I couldn’t get to the ones he’d “stored,” so I saved new ones, which he sometimes added to the inaccessible pile.

Yesterday I HAD to have a box. I needed a box badly enough that it was worth rummaging in The Box Aisle. I got angry enough at my inability to find a SINGLE APPROPRIATE BOX that I flinged EVERY box out of that aisle.

I saved the few old moving boxes that are the perfect size to fit on the shelves we can now get to, and I stacked them at the far end of that aisle so that we can still ACCESS the aisle. I also saved an assortment of smallish boxes: it’s pretty common for me to need a smallish box for something. I recycled ALL the rest.

Then I made a very ugly but fully functional box out of cardboard from a larger box, because in that whole pile there was not one single box the right size or even close.

I have a jade plant, which I grew from a surreptitiously-snapped piece of the nice big jade plant at the vet’s office. Jades are some of the easiest plants to propagate (i.e., make more of): they snap cleanly and root easily, and all you need to grow one is a V-shaped 2-leaf snippet—or 4-leaf is ideal, because that gives you some stem to work with after you snap off the bottom two leaves. Stick it in a pot of dirt and it will grow. (Or you can even root a single leaf, but it won’t grow more than that: the roots come from the snapped-off place, but the new growth comes only from the crook of the V. You will have a one-leaf houseplant. Nice for small apartments.)

(Note the neat leaf-growth pattern: two leaves,
then two leaves from that V, perpendicular to the first two leaves.
Then two more leaves from the new V,
perpendicular again so that they line up with the first two.
Two this way, then two that way, back and forth.)

In fact, they are so hardy and easy to propagate, I have a story to demonstrate: the same surreptitious piece I took from the vet’s office, I dropped into my purse all casual-like and forgot about it until hours and hours later, or maybe it was the next day (I hope it was the next day, because that makes a better story—but it was definitely WAY LATER), because that was the day I found out our cat George was dying so I was preoccupied and moony and not rememberful of pieces of sneakily-snapped jade dropped sneakily into purses. When I remembered it, it had been in my purse for hours and hours (or maybe a day!) and was wilted and dry looking—but I put it in soil anyway, and it rooted anyway. Good propagators, are jades, as I say.

You have to be careful where you snip, though, because the plant you snip from won’t grow anymore at that spot. Or so I learned in plant biology, though now that seems suspicious to me: why wouldn’t they? What I remember is that a scab forms over the wound, and the new growth can’t break through it, but I might have made that up and/or emotionally imagined it. But anyway, I always choose an inconspicuous spot—or ideally, a spot where I’d like the jade to stop growing anyway. The best is when a jade puts out a new two-leaf sprout from the V of a single leaf and the stem of that leaf: that little piece can be removed without breaking a back-and-forth branch.

Another thing I learned in plant biology is that plants grown in a breeze will be stronger than plants grown in still air: they grow stronger to keep from tipping over, which can make for some good analogies if you are in the mood for it. Wind resistance is important to consider when raising baby plants in greenhouses or indoors: if they’re food or otherwise staying indoors their whole lives, it doesn’t matter if they can’t stand up to a breeze; but if they’re trees or later-season plants or whatever and your goal is to transplant them into non-greenhouse air, they need to get used to air motion or else they’ll fall flat the first time you put them in it. You can toughen the plants up ahead of time with a rotating fan. Start it pretty far away, then move it closer as the plant gets used to it.

I didn’t think of that with my jade plant, and it’s okay because it can’t live outdoors in this region anyway. But when it leaned a bit, early on, I propped it up with a bamboo skewer. Today the skewer must have shifted, and without it, the plant fell. It was bent completely over. It can’t stand up without the skewer now, and it’s too late to strengthen it “as it grows,” because it already grew that part. And it’s getting too heavy for the skewer.

Jades are often weak: I see them in offices, propped with skewers, or grown several to a pot so they can prop each other up. It might not have strengthened, even if I hadn’t propped it. The leaves are heavy, and this isn’t where they grow naturally.

Mine needs a new pot, too. Another vaguely-remembered plant biology detail: a rule of thumb about plants needed as much room below the soil as above it. Or was that trees, and that their roots go as wide as the tree is tall? Well anyway, it needs a new pot.

I did SO MUCH boring-but-satisfying work around the house yesterday! I dispersed the contents of FOUR large bins from the basement shelves: some of it was warm-weather clothing that went into children’s rooms, but I put about half of it aside to be donated: I noticed we had about twice as many pairs of shorts as I needed for Edward (probably this was the size that got lost long enough I’d finally concluded the previous child had skipped the size and so repurchased it), and also I think it’s time to conclude that William is the only boy who’s going to wear slims so it’s safe to get rid of those handmedowns instead of hanging on to them just in case one of the two younger boys needs them, and also I threw out some jeans with holes in the knees—good thing I stored those for four years! My dining room will look SO MUCH BETTER when I finally remember to take the half-dozen bags of clothes to the donation dumpster.

I also took a binlet (like, not a BIG HUGE bin, but what do you call it so as not to give the impression of largeness?) of pure miscellany that Paul had dumped into it while moving furniture: all the pens and pencils and game pieces and refrigerator magnets and puzzle pieces and playing cards and small toys and pieces of possibly-important paper he found there. I’d been putting off dealing with it out of resentment: he got big glory for moving furniture, but would I get any for doing the fiddly cleaning up, even though it would take longer and be more of a pain? NO I WOULD NOT. And why would he just leave it there, as if somehow it were MY job? I went through it and tossed a lot of it (some of those game pieces were to games we haven’t had for years), and put away the rest of it (SIX rolls of tape! no wonder I can never find tape).

I also threw out a large pretty platter. It’s a neat shade of green, and it looked gorgeous sitting on our bureau with its matching pitcher on it. Until the pitcher broke several years ago. I couldn’t replace the pitcher (Target clearance, long gone), but I didn’t want to get rid of the platter, because every time I thought of doing so, I got mad about the broken pitcher again. As if perhaps saving the platter would mean the pitcher HADN’T broken. Anyway, I threw it out.

I planted a bunch of daffodil bulbs my mom didn’t want anymore, and while I was out there I planted the little pine tree I bought around Christmastime and the blueberry twig I bought to replace the one that died over the winter.

I went through a bag of Edward’s Christmas stocking stuff that turned out to be still hanging on the back of a dining room chair. I put away the few things that were in it, and threw out a handful of red and green M&Ms.

I dispersed the contents of a box I’d started as a “Donate This” box. Some things weren’t even worth Freecycling, so I tossed them out. Other things were worth Freecycling, so I Freecycled them.

I gathered up the singleton gloves I’d been noticing here and there and another-there, and put them in a drawer in the mud room. I took Elizabeth’s winter coat out of the mud room and hung it up in the hall closet. I found a pair of shoes, realized I hated them, realized that keeping them anyway wasn’t going to get me my money’s worth from them, and put them in the donation bag.

It was a lot of puttering: allowing myself to be led by what caught my eye next, instead of trying to work in a steady line across the room. And so the net effect is of a nice overall improvement, mostly in the dining room, though I also have the private satisfaction of knowing about the change in the basement a visitor wouldn’t see.

And this morning I melted a bag of frozen pineapple juice into the sink, which doesn’t SEEM like a big deal, and ISN’T, except that it marks The Attitude Change that comes with working steadily to improve the state of the household: I’ve noticed that instead of thinking, as I have for probably a year, “Oh, yeah, that bag of pineapple juice—we’re obviously not going to use that after all, and anyway I’m sure it’s no good anymore. Well, no sense dealing with it right this second if I’m not also going to deal with the bag of bread ends we’re apparently never going to feed to ducks, and also tidy up the freezer in general, and anyway there’s still plenty of room in there so there’s no rush,” I yoinked it when I noticed it and brought it upstairs with me and plunked it into the sink. Maybe later today I’ll yoink the duck bread.

I read Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things this past week, and if there’s a better book to set off a little spring-cleaning binge, I don’t know what it is.

(image from Amazon.com)

Have you seen this “clutter scale” test by one of the authors?

(I got it from here, where you can see it larger and also see other sample rooms.)

Our house is a 2, without stacks of newspapers, and the downstairs family room is a 3 because we’ve been using it as “I’ll just put this here temporarily” storage since it was built.

What I love about this chart is that I can SEE why a 2-3 feels hopeless and out of control (that is, I don’t feel silly for feeling that way)—while still receiving comfort that I’m low on the scale. My goal is to be somewhere between a 1 (which looks BEYOND tidy to me—like when I was a child and if I left a book on a chair when I went to the bathroom, my mother would close it and put it away on a shelf while I was gone) and a 2.

This weekend I tried to use some of the ideas I got from the book and from a couple of other articles I’ve seen on the topic of decluttering and from my own thoughts—ideas like, “Could I replace this easily if I regretted getting rid of it?” “Have I used it in X years and/or do I have reason to believe I will use it?” “Do I still feel distress AFTER getting rid of it, or only when thinking about getting rid of it?” “Does it bless or oppress?” “Do I consider it my job to be the caretaker of this item forever?” “Is saving it in my basement less of a waste than getting rid of it?” etc.

I got rid of three clocks I’ve been storing because clocks are useful even though I don’t like them and have replaced them with others. I got rid of a 3-foot stack of carefully-acquired Ladybug magazines that my firstborn loved with obsessive passion when he was 2 and none of the other kids have given the time of day. And two twin-size duvet sets I thought I’d use for Rob and William’s bunks 8 years ago but then didn’t. A bedskirt I got for Elizabeth 3 years ago but it didn’t work with her bed frame. A 2-foot stack of partially-used children’s workbooks. A package of size 2T-3T pull-ups bought on an awesome clearance and then never used.

All this is leading up to something I got rid of that I’d say might have been My Most Difficult Thing to Get Rid Of. It’s something I’ve been gradually accumulating for a decade, and have thought MANY TIMES that I should get rid of—but then couldn’t. I’ve felt simultaneously “The Owner of Riches” and “The Crazy Person Who Needs Help” over them.

It’s twin-sized flat sheets. I make the kids’ beds with only the fitted sheet and a blanket. But I keep the flat sheets, because what else could I do with them? THROW AWAY a perfectly good flat sheet, still new and folded, half the material/value of the package of sheets I just paid for? If I tried to donate it, who’d need JUST A FLAT SHEET? And what if when the kids were older I started using the flat sheets again? What if when the kids were grown I used the twin sheets on guest beds? Besides, they’re so handy as drop cloths and haircutting drapes! And so many of them are so PRETTY! And they’re FABRIC, and fabric is USEFUL! Fabric is a SUPPLY! If I knew how to sew I could use them to make quilts! or clothes for the children, Sound-of-Music style! Or I could make curtains that perfectly matched the bedding! And it would be perfect if I ever did that idea of wrapping gifts in pieces of fabric instead of wrapping paper! And what if there were an apocalypse? FABRIC IS USEFUL AND VALUABLE AND THESE ARE PERFECT HEMMED PIECES OF IT.

So I saved them, and continued to save them. We have five twin beds in our house, and we’ve had trouble with night-training more than one of the kids so I like a large supply, and also we use cotton-weave in summer and flannel in winter, and also I am always finding cute ones at 75% off, which is my way of leading up to the information that I had over 30 twin-sized flat sheets in a closet—and that’s not counting the three I stored elsewhere as drop cloths and haircutting drapes. They took up 1.5 shelves in a good and useful closet. When I loaded them into bags for a Freecycler to pick up, they filled two large black garbage bags TIGHTLY.

I did save two of my favorites. They were the ones that, when I tried to put them in the bag with the others, I thought to myself, “No, never mind, this is a bad idea. I’ll just put them all back on the shelf.”