Last weekend felt both small and memorable. Friday our small neighbor was over for the morning, and by staying outside for a few hours myself, I was able to keep the kids outside. When it's not summer so that everyone is home from school, it feels like such a battle to get the kids enough outdoor time. They rode bikes, puttered around, and collected and decorated pinecones with peanut butter and bird seed. I hung the cones in our little front tree, which I also pruned, and used the long sticks to make some sort of strange Earth Mother decoration which I hung on our front porch. I also pruned our three hateful front shrubs, hauled the clippings to the compost, and hung our hose up for the winter. Other big projects for the weekend.... I hung a VERY heavy mirror I had sitting on the floor for some months in our kitchen/dining/laundry/mud room, and... moved litter boxes.
When I was a child, we had some neighbors who moved away from their duplex for a while and came back maybe a year later. I don't remember the circumstances exactly, but I remember one day my mom and another neighbor went over their to clean out their freezer. The freezer wasn't working and the rotting meat therein was full of maggots. I didn't go in the house, but played in the yard for hours while these VILE smells, like I have never smelled before or after, came wafting around. That smell and my visualization of what has caused it has been my benchmark for *nasty* ever since.
...Due to the drainage problems in our sloping bathroom, and the fact that the cats kick litter out of their boxes no matter what, our bathroom had reached a crisis. Despite the philosophical and space reasons for keeping a litter box in the bathroom, it. was. not. working. So now both of our litter boxes are in our kitchen/dining/laundry/mudroom. It's crowded in here. I do have future solutions on my mind for the time soon when we don't have to move the sofa in here during group classes.... The cleaning of the vileness under and behind the industrial shelving in the bathroom, previously meant to be part of the solution, didn't rate quite as high as the maggot-ed duplex. But it was not completely out of that league. Cleaning involved a trash bag, a vacuum cleaner, a brand new roll of paper towels, a metal blade found in the garage, and enough bleach I could still smell it two days later. "Gag a maggot" is a phrase used in my family. It was that. And when I was done, the floor was likely clean enough to eat off of, but my interest in doing so was a negative ten. I was very proud of the result, and proud of myself for tackling and finishing it.
Saturday morning, I was on for playing piano in the little kid Sabbath school class, and as the girls were still sleeping at departure time, only Lazarus and I went. He petered out partway through the church service so we came home to find the family band going wild in the living room. Jared was improvising on the piano, Anne had made drums out of our bulk bins, and Laurel was dancing and playing arm violin with a practice bow.
Saturday night Linda was hosting a house concert, and as Jeffrey was out of town, either Jared or I was slated to attend and help move furniture, etc. Since I'd been down to Auburn already that morning, it was Jared's turn.
Backing up a night...What transpired, though, on Friday evening, and throughout Saturday afternoon and evening was very wonderful - both completely ordinary, and completely magical. We put up our little tiny Christmas tree purchased the previous evening at the corner lot and lugged home on top of the stroller, as well as our two strings of indoor white lights, and we got out the unbreakable decorations. It is constantly in a state of being decorated and undecorated by small hands. Very fun. We created a whole Christmas corner with the tree, a windowsill of angels, and the wooden nativity. And then... the snowflake factory started. Between Anne and Jared and me, we must have made fifty or more snowflakes in all the hues available from a pack of construction paper and a pack of printer paper. Amazing!
Saturday night while Jared was gone, I threaded all those flakes and hung them from the ceiling. We also took down our felt Thanksgiving tree and tacked up our felt Christmas tree. I also set up my great-grandmother's electric/ceramic tree in another windowsill. Additionally I cleaned the kitchen and most especially the kitchen sink, which had moved onto the *vile scale*. And found a new spot for our ALWAYS IN THE WAY rolling dishwasher. It's the little things. Also it's probably stress cleaning, although that's vaguer and harder to pinpoint.
Jumping ahead to yesterday... I pulled out the cloth diapers again and reconfigured the bathroom storage for them, so we're going to have another go with that. I am trying to cut down on waste and consumption and especially PLASTIC. Every toothbrush manufactured since they started making plastic toothbrushes in the 1930s is STILL out there. Lots of them are floating in the ocean. That is also vile. Recycling mostly doesn't happen, no matter what you put in your recycle bin. So that leaves it down to reduce and reuse...
I have moved so many times without cleaning out. And have collected so much STUFF. So many places felt temporary, and I didn't want to get rid of things I'd want in the next place. Now we have added three more people and their stuff. The necessities of life are expensive these days. And the luxuries are cheap and badly made... I'm only a few months from forty, and I sort of vaguely imagined I would not be living like a clutter freak and hoarder at such a distinguished age. So now I've joined a cleaning-out group for mothers and the Buy Nothing Project (both amazing facebook groups), and I'm getting the inspiration and the destination for all the stuff that is not working in this house. I'm expecting to live in this house for a LONG time, because it has been such a slow and tricky move in, and moving seems extremely unpractical/financially unfeasible for any years I can imagine in the future. I feel sentimental about almost all kid stuff, especially baby stuff, but I've managed to offload some unused toys and the baby bath and walker that Laurel has outgrown. Some people are not sentimental at all and can declutter easily. I am not there, but I am irritated enough about the mounds of junk on every horizontal surface, that I can do hard things so I don't have to live the rest of my life this way. Maybe it's not stress cleaning. Maybe it's Swedish death cleaning. I can't wait for our two-week Christmas break coming up so I can WORK on the project without having to be ready for students at various hours.
Sunday afternoon, just as I was finishing up typing the programs for tomorrow's and Tuesday's studio recitals, I received an email saying my reservation for the library for Sunday was cancelled. The whys and wherefores are not entirely clear, and I think it might have been my fault. I ran out to garage where Jared was installing the baseboard heaters to ask him to help me brainstorm a solution and saw Anne coming down the alley with our neighbors. I hadn't seen her yet that day, as I had been out on a walk when she woke up and was invited to their house. I joined them and told my friend about the problem. She brainstormed for some moments, too, but the best thing she said was, whatever happens, it will all be over in a week. I thought that was such a great way to look at the problem. It was only temporary! I texted and emailed some people whom I thought might have some ideas for me, and put it to bed. Monday morning I started making cold calls (something I despise!!!!!!!) to various retirement facilities, and mercifully got a yes in under half an hour. ("Hi, this is Ruth Marie Balance, and I am a local violin teacher. I have twenty young musicians ready to give a recital at 2:00 on Sunday, but we don't have a venue. Can we come perform for your residents?")
There's so many more details I'm leaving out, but that's the gist of it for now...
I have another post I have been wanting to write for a month about bedtime stories, but blogging time is pretty limited these days.
