Pretend Grown Up

I don’t have a desk at home, I have a laptop that follows me wherever I choose to work.  Most often, that’s a corner of my sunny dining room near a cabinet that contains my craft projects, a basket for those essential things we all seem to have, and an assortment of chargers for the family electronics.  

My essentials basket has a collection of items: address labels, bookmarks, stickers, JT’s schooI pictures, and the odds-and-ends of daily life, including the few bills that I don’t receive on-line.  Essential papers like car insurance and car registration renewals are also stored in the basket, which I keep to a reasonable size so as to prevent the accumulation of crap.

Of course, crap still accumulates.  When it seems especially over-flowing, I clean out the basket to find things I’d forgotten I had and plenty of things I should never have saved.  This week, I’m finishing up a project to pack up the entire first floor of my house in preparation for my wood floors to be refinished.  This means that the whole cabinet gets cleaned out and packed up.

That process has convinced me that I am barely a grown up.  For starters, the sheer volume of stickers that I’ve found in the cabinet suggests I’m a child.  For another, I unearthed my car registration just days from its due date.  The alarming fact here is that I had completely forgotten the registration was due.

As each corner of the first floor gets tidied and then packed up, I look forward to putting the house back together when the floors are complete.  I fantasize that I’ll return a tidier and more well-organized adult.  

After all, one must live in hope.