How you get in a mood to clean a closet

I have a closet in my dining room. My house really has a lot of great storage space. Today I began to clean out this closet. I don’t know about you, but the closet-space doesn’t seem to help me stay organized.

When we moved into this house fifteen years ago (nearly to the day), we put the liquor bottles on the top shelf. Almost all of them are still there. The girls have complained bitterly about this. “Why do you have them if you’re not going to use them?”

“You don’t,” I have said, “get the concept of a liquor cabinet.”

On the shelf below this are the vases whose number keeps growing. A few more “special” days and I’ll have to throw some away.

On the third shelf are the giant trays that Donny uses when we have a family gathering or he caters someone else’s massive affair.

Here’s where it gets a little dicey because below this are two shelves of “paper work”…in other words, bills and whatnot…and I say dicey because the paper has begun to leak upward onto the tray shelf and downward onto the floor. On the tray shelf there is also a napkin holder that is stuffed with those receipts you save when you pick up a prescription and in another receptacle of some sort (a short tub-like vase?) are address labels. The list could go on and on.

I only just started cleaning and I’m finding stuff there from the coffee shop days. It closed five years ago, but there they still are: ledger sheets and even the cash box where I’d keep extra change.

I really did a great job with my house until the coffee shop days. The first year we had the shop we didn’t even decorate our Christmas tree. I mean there was no time for anything. I’d work twelve hour days and then come home and sit at the dining room table to do the deposit, and then do the writing that I was compelled to do besides. As embarrassing as it is to say it, there is still a sheet of sandwich labels taped inside one of the cupboard doors. I have cleaned out those cupboards many times since and somehow couldn’t shed that reminder of the “chore” that put me over the edge: making sandwiches with bean sprouts, (do you know how fast bean sprouts go bad? I do) and sandwiches with hummos and cucumbers, and turkey sandwiches with carrot shavings on the top for crying out loud. But I digress. Or maybe not.

I’m telling you all this because I threw out a ton of paper with sensitive information on it and Donny doused it with lighter fluid and set it ablaze in the fire pit outside the cabin. It’s been raining a lot and so it’s been a weak fire … just poofy tendrils of smoke that drift past the window and give me that feeling of something different out there. It startles me from time to time the way I get startled when someone unexpectedly walks down the path.

So the smoke reminded me of the cause and the cause got me writing about cleaning out the closet, and it makes me wonder about how you get into a mood to clean a closet.

What I’m talking about is the mood that hits from a place beyond the circumstantial, one that just comes over you without having thought about it in advance, or having set aside the time, or after having put it on a list or any of those things. When you suddenly simply find yourself doing it.

I figure it’s got to have something to do with all my feelings of late, those feelings of turning toward a new time of life.

It’s time to get rid of a few things. Maybe it’s even time to drink some liquor.

Maybe it’s even time to take down the list of sandwiches that remind me to never, ever, not in a million years, get myself into something like that again. You have no idea how often Donny or one of the girls will dream about it, some new “owning our own business” venture that makes me want to pack up and run for the hills.

Maybe the list of sandwiches will have to stay. (Let me repeat: I am not a food person. Not a food person. Not a food person.) I don’t want to start anything that ties me down. I’m living and dying for freedom here (in case you haven’t been able to tell). Yeah, yeah, you can say freedom’s an inner thing…just don’t say it around certain folks, like small business owners.

I suppose this owning a business background (among other background stories) is one of the reasons I’m not one of those who believe that your circumstances shouldn’t matter to your state of mind. In my view, they matter like hell. You can find making sandwiches pushing you over the edge into insanity, and you can find yourself cleaning out a closet on the spur of the moment for what may be no reason at all or one that sneakily and tediously links back to the sandwiches and a time of life that dragged on too long, that now is over, and is over for good reason.

Endings are harder on me than beginnings.

What Does Freedom Feel Like?

I’m up…finally…before the sun. It’s because of Maxie. He got left out all night. He was crying so loud right outside my window about 6:20 that Donny and I both flew out of bed with that “what’s wrong” feeling. Max came in like a scared teenager out past his bedtime. He is a well-trained yard cat in the daytime. If he gets forgotten or accidentally left out after dark, he returns to his untrained nature. He roams. Then he comes back to the door puzzled to find it closed. Who knows how long it took him to bring his sorrowful and desperate cries to the bedroom window.

Max came in. I came out to the cabin.

It took me 20 minutes to do it though, to get out here, part of that time spent sitting on the bed. I wasn’t really debating whether or not to come, just waking up. Max’s cries had made me do one of those jump-start wake ups. Now I know there’s not all that long left before sunrise. The difference between 6:20 and 6:40 is extreme. Along the freeway side of the fence the trees are silhouettes of black jiggling shapes against a white sky with a little color along the edge, and in front of me there’s some distinction growing out of the darkness on the ground, but there’s other places the light hasn’t reached, and this is what I love. I feel thrilled. There’s just something about it – about me being here at this hour – that feels so fantastic, as if I’m in sync with this time of day and free.

The day hasn’t gotten going yet, it’s not fully formed, there’s nobody else up and there’s no expectations. No one’s missing me. I’m not missing out on being with Henry in his own cuddly waking-up hour. Not missing breakfast.

But it’s more than that – something about the change – the way the day comes alive around me that makes me feel part of it, and with the world, that one-with-it-all feeling.

I just started setting my alarm for 5 again. (It went off this morning and I somehow managed to shut it off without waking up as I have for about three or four days in a row.) I didn’t used to have to do that. I’d wake up early on my own. Then my rhythm got all screwed up by the job. Why is it that when you’ve got a job you have to use an alarm and when you don’t you get up naturally? The job’s behind me by two months now, the next one not yet here, and still my body hasn’t found it’s way back to what’s natural. Part of it is that I get the same kind of feeling at night that I get in the early morning. I’m ready to go to bed. So is everyone else. The house quiets down. Then I want to stay up even though I’m bleary eyed.

You’ve got to find your quiet hours. And sometimes they’re one’s like Max finds when he’s out on the prowl at night, when he turns into that untrained cat that doesn’t follow the rules. They’re the one’s you’re desperate to find even if it means you sometimes stay out too late and find some door closed when you’re ready to come back from wherever it is you’ve wandered. It’s why you go there; part of the thrill. What’s out there? What will you discover?

What does freedom feel like?

And if it feels so good you can’t hardly stand it, you don’t mind getting scared once in a while.