Closet Desires

It's silly how little things can be so big.

I cleaned my closet. And now I am IN LOVE!

Last Saturday held an event that I wait for all year every year. No, not Christmas. Not Mother's Day. Not my birthday. It was the Washington Elementary Home Tour! The annual fund raiser for my daughter's school has taken on monumental meaning in my life. (Scroll back in my blog and you'll find photos from last year's home tour -- don't miss the flying monkey!).

This year, somehow, I became enamoured with closets. Maybe this was because there was only one house on the tour that I truly adored. Or it could be that, as a home tour volunteer for the first half of the day, I was stationed for a time in the "His" part of the his and hers closet/bath in a remodelled 1891 two-story. But don't feel too sorry for me -- this closet had bay windows, a marble shower and vanity, an antique desk, a handsome masculine armchair, and a flat screen tv! I marvelled at the tidiness. I counted the clothing (44 shirts, 8 suits, 3 pair of jeans, 12 pair of slacks, 22 tshirts). I pondered the livestyle. I soaked it all in.

How do people live so meticulously? I have clothes strewn everywhere. I have laundry coming and going and stalled out. I have "outta here" boxes loitering in my tv room. I have outfit considerations hanging around my bedroom like ghosts. And these people have all their clothes lined up in their closets with space between the hangers and not one single lost or hooky-playing shirt anywhere. Granted, they did probably clean like mad for weeks in preparation for the masses of the home tour trampling through their home. Or not. But, regardless, they both inspired and shamed me into spending the bulk of a perfectly good Saturday evening digging in my closet like a prarie dog adding on a bonus room!

Now my closet is CLEAN! And, oh, the wonder! I am in love. I gravitate to it. I stand in the door and soak it in whenever I pass. I revel in it as I dress. I made everyone in the house come up and admire and repeat scripted lines about the beauty of it. Mark seems to understand too -- yesterday he took me into the closet to show and tell me that he has so much respect for what I have done in there that he didn't dare fall short of maintaining it and that I should notice how there were no clothes overflowing the hamper and even his shoes were all lined up!

The joy my closet now gives me is exponentially greater than the sum of it's parts and completely disproportionate to reality. My world could easily revolve around that small room tucked upstairs where my joy now resides.

Skirts now hang at attention in their own shamelessly segregated section. Dresses are grouped by type with all four black dresses united in their own little cocktail party. Jeans do not carelessly mingle with slacks. The back corner holds a glorious profusion of formals including my green taffeta prom dress and the delicious chocolate brown satin dress that I wore to our wedding rehearsal dinner. In the corner of the top shelf is a stack of my grandmother's hat boxes. In a stack of matching plastic shoe boxes are, among others, the shoes I wore to my sister's wedding and the ones that I wore to my high school graduation. Belts have their own basket. As do scarves, socks, purses, and sweaters. Nine matching canvas bins hold sleepwear, lingerie, leggings, swimsuits, and sweatshirts. Tshirts and tank tops all have their assigned places. Luggage fits neatly on the top shelf. Shoes neatly line the rack on the back of the door.

Oh! And the lighting. I replaced the pathetic single bulb "builder basic" light fixture with what I like to call an "antler" fixture. I has four heads that each spotlight their own assigned section of the closet. The room looks like a high-end clothing store due to this exceptional lighting! This is particularly wonderful after a recent spell of NO lighting in the closet due to a sudden, deadly lightbulb epidemic that swept through in the course of a few days leaving no survivors (replacements, being costly, did not materialize immediately)!

A couple of years ago, my darling Tessa (then about 11) asked one day if she could organize my closet. Of course I said yes! She proceeded to color coortinate all my shirts! I loved it so much I have maintained the system and converted Mark's side of the closet as well. I've come to love knowing just where to focus when I wake up in a pink mood or a green phase!

I now delight in hanging up stray shirts --neatly inserting them into their slot in their color section with an almost-audible, satisfying "CLICK". I diligently move empty hangers to the empty hanger section. I even got rid of a bunch of clothes so everything would fit better. Granted, there are still no spaces between my hangers, but at least all the hangers fit! And all the hangers are white plastic and MATCHING! Because wire hangers and mismatched colors are just too imperfect. You knew that, I'm sure.

And now I wonder: why is it such a big deal to me?

At the moment, I have three jobs. I drive children for three and a half hours a day to school and basketball and home -- more on days with appointments or other events. I put in 16+ hour days most of the time. My husband is away on business 85% of the time lately. I'm afraid of my bank account. My dogs still think my commands are mere suggestions. The cats have their own household government. I feel overwhelmed and helpless and stressed out of my mind and, oh, did I mention OVERWHELMED?

And then there's my closet, my little island of serenity. Proof that I can master SOMETHING. Proof that order and peace DO still exist in the world are ARE potentially attainable.

I can now walk around out in the world with the warm, sustaining knowledge that my closet, a thing of beauty and order and deep, deep meaning, awaits at home ready to reassure me that I am, indeed, a success at SOMETHING!

Christine's House

Mark and I have a running debate. We often spar over whether or not selling houses is actually selling -- as in requiring sales skills.

Mark is a natural-born salesman. He could sell ice in the Arctic. I, on the other hand, want to go hide in the house at my own garage sales. I could fail miserably at selling ice in the desert. So, if selling houses really IS sales, I am getting into the wrong business!

I say that you can't sell someone a house -- in terms of being the force that convinces the buyer to purchase. A house isn't an impulse buy. A house is our largest material necessity. No one is going to buy a house on impulse like they buy those shoes or those golf clubs that they end up smuggling into some hiding place in the closet.

A person must find THEIR HOME. They must find the place they want to wake up in the morning and go to sleep in at night and be the backdrop for all the scense that go on in the middle. They must find the place that FEELS RIGHT. My job is just to come up with a list of possibilities and open the doors.

Similarly, you can't go out and find a buyer for a house you're trying to sell. You can try to pull as many people as possible into the house to see it and make the house look as optimal as possible (hence my staging business). But, for the most part, you have to wait for the right person to walk into "their" house.

This week I spent several days with my first buyers: an incoming History professor from Virginia, his wife, and one of their three young sons. They had three days to learn Fayetteville, choose their favorite area, and find a house they wanted.

The first day was a whirwind! We looked at 12 or 14 houses in many different parts of town. They honed in on their preferred area and then we tried to find the most optimal house in that region.

I'll never forget the look on Christine's face the first time we left the house they would end up choosing. She looked like she was in love! I never saw that look on her face in any other house. The love affair was clear enough that I even said to her, "It looks like you've found your house!" Her reply was: "Ssssshhhhh!"

Over the next two days, I watched this couple weigh their options, wrangle over their differences, and wrestle with the financial practicalities of it all. I also watched them make the same decision at least four times over. Christine knew her house.

I just openned the door!

Never Mind...

I was going to write something sparkling and witty and brilliant for the blog this morning -- especially after being rather (ok, VERY) depressing lately with "As She Lay Dying" and all that.

But then I read Heather's blog post for today www.dooce.com and now I'm completely intimidated. She makes it look so easy. Maybe that's why she's #22 on the 2009 list of Best Blogs! That would make sense.

My writing is something I do for myself (I remind that same self). But it would be nice to be semi-decent at it (kinda like semi-sweet chocolate is really, massively spectacular despite the disclaimer-like use of the word "semi", you know?).

Oh well. Yawn...

The Anything and Everything Principle

File this under "Things I've Learned"!

I have learned that, when I don't know what to do about a problem, the best solution is to do anything and everything I can think of -- simultaneously. This usually combines exercise with vitamins with Googling with seeking wisdom from others with prayer with brainstorming with whatever else I can think of. Basically, it's throwing the whole tool box at the problem!

The really neat thing it that it almost always works! You may never know what exactly it was that worked, but something DOES work! It may be one thing. It may be a combination of things. It may be the whole dynamic or just taking an attitude of action. But something usually works! And I love the comfort of knowing that something WILL work. To go from a place of despair to a place of confidence and hope is a wonderful thing! There's something about pulling yourself out of the mire and crawling up onto a rock like a frog out of a swamp that grows our legs and frees us to jump!

My favorite example of how this method worked for me came in response to a medical diagnosis: hypothyroidism. Me? HYPOthroid? It didn't feel like MY body they were talking about. It just felt WRONG. I had the lab re-run the test. Same result.

The doctor wanted to put me on synthetic thyroid hormones FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE! I balked at the very thought.

I begged the doctor for time and took to my computer. In the course of researching the thyroid, I happened onto a little phrase that said that the thyroid gland is a calcium receptor. Hmmm...

When I thought about it, I realize that I was drinking a LOT of calcium fortified orange juice every day and some milk on top of that. I calculated that I was getting 4-5 times the recommended daily allowance of calcuim. What if I'm overloading my thyroid with too much calcium, I wondered. I switched to regular OJ and focused my mind on the number I wanted to see on my next thyroid test.

A month later the test came back at the exact number I had envisioned! Problem solved!

A few years later my thyroid levels were off again. I realized that I was drinking LOTS of milk. I cut back on the milk and my thyroid levels went right back to normal again! Like magic!

If you have used the "anything and everything" method or do so in the future, let me know how it went/goes. I want to hear stories!

Perspective

(Warning: This post relates heavily to previous posts so, if it makes no sense to you, that's why! Sorry it's not a literary masterpiece but I'm just where I am today!)


Another important lesson I learned from my mother's death is this: if no one is actually, physically, immediately DEAD or DYING, how bad can it really be?

I spent today estranged from the whole fairy dust principle. I cried my way through church and then wrestled all afternoon with hopelessness and some pretty staunch bitterness at God (among others) about circumstances in my present situation.

I finished my open house, went home, and took to my bed. Turns out God had a correspondence course waiting for me on TV. I don't really know how it happened, but I found myself watching a show about two young college women who were involved in an horrific car wreck. One died. The other suffered a brain injury and significant facial swelling. Their identities were switched at the scene of the accident and their families mourned/nursed the wrong person for over a month.

Who can watch such a thing without trying to imagine how all the parties involved might feel and what it would be like to get a second chance like that? In the course of this mental process of empathy, I was walked, step-by-step to the conclusion I've come to before, to the lesson I've learned before but that is easy to forget:

Really now -- no one is dying here!


Next up: the "anything and everything" principle

As She Lay Dying

The summer I was 23 my mother was busy dying. It's an intricate thing, this prolonged method of dying. The demon in our midst was cancer. Cancer of liver or pancreatic origin. No one ever decided for sure. It didn't matter anyway because it was far-flung and out of control by the time they found it.

To harbor hope or to dissolve into despair? To live or to die? To make a big deal out of every moment or just live in an ordinary day? Those were the existenialities we wrestled with that summer. Every moment, waking or sleeping, was steeped in a surreal kind of terror. We walked a tightrope of agony.

But you soon learn the necessity of just going on with the ordinary. To try to infuse every pregnant moment with importance and meaning is just plain exhausting. Mother wasn't into resolving issues, reconciling relationships, or making moments. She was just trying not to throw up and wishing that something would make the pain subside. It was hell and none of us wanted to live in our hell. We all just wanted to find a way to pass through it.

But we, the onlookers, the family, suffered only emotional agony. Mother's emotional agony was compounded by her impending doom and by the cruelty of her physcial agony.

It had started with digestive problems over the course of a year and a half or so. She knew something was very wrong but could get no diagnosis. Then one day she awoke with a circle of burning skin on the side of her ribcage. It burned like fire, felt like sunburn only worse, she told me. Turns out it was a spot of wayward cancer trying to eat itself out from the inside.

There were other spots too: on her lung, on her liver, in her spine. Silly little "spots". They sound so innoncent. But they aren't. They mean there's very little hope to be had. They mean the cancer has taken over. But you fight it anyway. Even Mother, who always swore (in theory) that she would never do chemotherapy, did chemotherapy.

The first day of chemo felt strangely exciting -- like the first day of kindergarten or something. I guess it allowed us to feel like there was something we could do. We could march into the hospital all smiles and joviality and fight back. It was the most active attack we could launch.

They weighed her (114 that would drop to maybe 80 by the end) and took her blood pressure (having blood pressure meant that some things were still in working order, right?). And then they sat her in a high-backed turquoise vinyl recliner across from a soap opera on tv and started filling out forms.

She had to sign papers to promise not to sue the hospital if they spilled any of the chemotherapy drugs on her skin. They would burn her skin on contact. And they were cheerfully about to pump this poison into my mother's frail body. That's when the bottom fell out for me.

I wanted to run away. I wanted to call in the adults to handle this. Oh wait -- we were the only adults there were. Twenty-three counts as adult. But twenty-three is still WAY to young to have to think about pumping poison in to your beloved mother to try to kill the evil thing inside her that is even stronger than burn-on-contact poison.

She threw up for a week. Sleep. Throw-up. Sleep. Throw-up. The cycle just repeated itself. Day and night. Every day we hoped it would be over. Every day it just continued. I had to shut off the empathy function of my brain. I couldn't bear to think how she must feel.

It was early afternoon on Thursday when I took the grocery list and drove 25 minutes into town to the store. The small-town Oklahoma grocery store was dim and dank. Focusing on the products lined neatly on the shelves was difficult. I had to push aside the shroud of despair that enveloped me and fight back tears at times to concentrate on the task. Peaches. Cottage cheese.Monterrey Jack cheese. Brisket. Most of the food wasn't for mother. It was for the rest of us -- those who had to keep up our strength to take care of her. Those of us who got to be normal but felt crushing guilt for being so. Pudding cups (for mother). Pedialyte (to try to keep her hydrated). Toilet paper. For normality. Even though I couldn't have felt more detached from normality, swirling as I was in a surreal place where life and death clash,while walking among people who were existing in the presence of life, blissfully detached from of death, consumed by their trivial day-to-day concerns.

About halfway though the store I came to the end of an aisle. Parked at the end of the aisle, two women in their late 20's stood talking over their carts.

"MY mother is driving me crazy!" one of them bitched to the other. "She blah blah blah."

"Oh, MINE is worse!" the other countered, "She blah blah blah.

They laughed and shook their heads at the burden of the mothers involved in their lives, healthy enough to be irritating.

I made a wide circle around them, annoyed, gave them an bit of an evil eye, listened to their continued complaining about the women who had give birth to and raised them as I worked my way down the next aisle, forming a speech to them in my head. It began with, "MY mother is at home in bed on chemo" and ended with "You ought to appreciate that your mother is alive!" In between was the crazed rant that kept me from saying anything to them. I didn't want to shame them and I didn't want to unload my heavy baggage on their blessed, ordinary day.

In rhetrospect, I should have said something to them. My words, my situation, the message I had for them was important. I did them a disservice by not delivering the lesson. In the two decades since, I have tried to make up for my omission by telling this story anytime it was applicable. I hope it's proven important to some. It's a lesson you can never truly absorb until you've lived it. But I hope today I can give someone a new appreciation.

My mother died on October 15, 1989. Five months after her diagnosis. Two years after her symptoms began. She was 48 years old.

I still miss my mother desperately. Even the passage of twenty years has not dulled the cruel agony of that time or the depth of the loss. My daughters never got to meet the grandmother who had SO looked forward to having grandchildren, who saved a big basket of building blocks from my childhood for them, who had envisioned summers full of grandkids at her house on the lake. We all lost SO much.

Now, go call your mother if you can! Or make your kids read this!

To see a photo of my mother, Carol Baker Cromwell, scroll down to the end of the previous post "Mortality in a Box"

Footnote: Today, February 25th would have been Mother's 69th birthday. Happy Birthday Mother!

Socks and Dust Bunnies vs. Alpha Cat

If you read my previous post "Fairy Dust" then you know that snow sprinkled and sparkled onto my car. And that God has given me His divine blessing. Now my socks have confirmed it!

You know all those missing socks that we accuse the poor, innocent dryer of eating? Sure you do! (Especially you, my dear cousin who reads my blog -- you seem particularly obsessed with it!)

I was REALLY starting to wonder if the secret sock society hated me because I have a whole basket full of single socks. A big basket, I might add. Most sane people would have thrown them all out and bought more by now but it was the principle of the thing for me (and perhaps I'm not a sane person anyway!). I knew that all those socks were in this house SOMEWHERE! And I was going to find them (ok, wait for them to turn up eventually -- but it's idealogically the same process)!

TODAY I FOUND THE MISSING SOCKS! TWICE, actually!

I spent most of the day cleaning (read: unearthing) Sara-Grace's room. Under her chair I found a dozen socks! I recognized them as the runaways because I have futilely tried to match up their lonely mates many times and had thus developed an uneasy familiarity with them. I think the missing faction had formed an alliance with the dust bunnies there under the chair and I suspect they were plotting to overthrow the Alpha cat in the house and launch a hostile takeover of the game cabinet -- just for something to do.

And then, as if finding one batch of missing socks weren't joy enough, I came across ANOTHER batch! Twenty or so socks were camped out in the bottom of a basket of laundry that an eight-year-old (who shall remain nameless) had never put away. Why she had my socks in her basket I can't say, but who cares? Now I can wear a DIFFERENT pair of socks EVERY day! Oh JOY!

So, as you can see. Great, miraculous things are beginning to happen to me. I have God and the socks on my side (and maybe the dust bunnies too -- no, I swept them all up. Too bad!)

To find your own missing socks, go to the most cluttered, neglected, procrastinated spot in your house. If you listen carefully, you can probably hear them laughing at you and giggling like a bunch of six-year-olds playing hide-and-seek! Good luck!

And now I must go conquer the world!