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Show My husband is neat, I'm sloppier Things are 'ship-shape' and Shipwreck' By SUSIE DAVIS Clipper Correspondent At our house things are in between be-tween "ship-shape and "shipwreck.' My husband is so neat that in 25 years of marriage the only thing I've picked up after him is an occasional newspaper. I love it and I love that quality in him. He is an organized man. On the other hand, I tend to be a little sloppier. I recognize this and work at it but it isn't "doin what comes naturally." nat-urally." What is natural for me is forming and maintaining relationships, relation-ships, finding life an adventure, and being mom to a bunch of pretty neat kids, and anything creative. As a former English teacher, there is nothing I relish more than helping my kids get started on creative writing or analyzing works of literature. But the real world is with us, and I find I am constantly trying to work at something very difficult for me. Gladys Allen, in her tape about dejunking, says that there are many of us who are "organizationally impaired." That is definitely me. What to do about it? As I've said, some people have the ability to be organized about their possessions just naturally. I felt like giving up after visiting with my daughter and my son-in-law in Boston. While he is in law school and she is working, they share responsibilities. Becky said that after a trip to Plymouth Rock and a group of friends for turkey on Thanksgiving, she fell asleep exhausted. The next day she said that the "house fairy" had completely cleaned everything. And it just comes naturally. While there I saw dirty dishes washed and put away right after use and all of their things tidy and neat. Craig is "one of those" like my husband. He's good at many things, and organizing is one of them. I had wanted a picture of Author's Au-thor's Row, a row in the cemetery near their apartment where Louisa May Alcott, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson were buried. Because of the snow I couldn't get there. Craig had his pictures of the spot located in five minutes, including the negatives. If that had been me, I would have had to perform major archaeology to find the picture and who knows about the negative! Not only that, when we returned from sightseeing with brochures about the Christian Science Map-parium, Map-parium, a huge globe of stained glass you can walk into, he had them cataloged in a scrapbook in which he keeps empty plastic pages, ready to file things away. Listening to Gladys Allen has convinced me, that you aren't ever too old to resolve to do better, whether you have a natural ability or not. The subject of her tape is dejunking. de-junking. I've listened to the tape about three times, and I'm a believer. I have done what she suggests. sug-gests. I'm throwing it out! She says, "How would you like to lose 250 pounds in one weekend and feel and look better!" It is such a relief to simply throw stuff out or give it away. Her premise in the words of Wordsworth is that "the world is too much with us." And with the accumulation of 25 years of marriage, I've decided that more is definitely not better. Allen cites an incident about a woman who moved into an apart ment while her home was being built. Things in storage, she only had to maintain a very few items. She never felt more efficient. The day that the moving van pulled up with her possessions, "junk" included, in-cluded, she felt out of control. In all the books I've read on housekeeping, the number one priority is getting rid of the junk. Don Aslet advocates "dejunking." From a practical standpoint, consider con-sider this approach. Allen suggests having three bags and putting them in the room in which you're working. work-ing. One is for garbage, one is for charity, and one is for either packing pack-ing away or rearranging. She suggests sug-gests a box for paper to be sorted later. Attack one room at a time and go around the room putting items in the various bags, and papers in the box. If you are sentimentally attached to some items which are not useful, put them in a box. When there is a junk drive, don't open the lid simply take out the box and put it on the truck. If you open the lid, you'll probably end up keeping the box one more year. Living with "ship-shape" is great, and my trip to Boston has convinced me that we are bom with special abilities. One of Craig's is his organization. But I'm not going to go down without a battle even though my natural, creative tendencies tenden-cies are "shipwreck." I'm going to dejunk or start a support group called slopanonymous. |