I am not by nature an organized person. My right brainedness can’t line things up mathematically or order things alphabetically. Heck, I’m even a mess in the library. If it were up to me the cookbooks would be all stacked somewhere between “g” for good eats and “y” for yuck. The master bathroom in my first house didn’t have a laundry hamper…the floor did the job and clothing was washed in order of need, not just when they were dirty. No, I’ve never had the accusation of “neat nick” slung my way. I am, however, drawn to those personalities like mosquitoes are drawn to my lily white legs in the summer. From my earliest memories my best friends have always been “cleanies” .Take my very first BFF, my cousin Len. He would help me clean and organize my playhouse. How did we know he was destined to be an incredible interior designer? Well, I knew because he could arrange a box of toys and dolls to look like a Macy’s Christmas window in under two minutes and that was at six years old! Then, my friend Kathy, she was the one who was a little older and taught me oh so much about life. My mama would put down the law about me going anywhere on Saturday before I got my room cleaned up. Kathy would laugh and say come on, I’ll help you, and she would proceed to work circles around me as I stood there watching in amazement holding my pillow with the Donnie Osmond cover. I was not lazy, I was clueless!
How is it that some people just seem to come into this world with a sense of where things should go? I don’t get that. Unfortunately, I had no gene to pass on to my children. A good friend was lamenting the other day about her child with OCD tendencies. She said his things had to be “just so”, I told her I’d trade him for two of mine….the thought of having just one in a house with seven people who would whip the rest of us into shape was overwhelming! Of course a trade would have been impossible, we would have surely sent the poor kid screaming into the night, needing a lifetime of therapy.
My two grown daughters seem to have acquired a taste of the neat life. They are much better housekeepers than me, like I said they don’t have it in their genes, maybe it comes from shear will to not be overtaken by dust bunnies. But, this is not really a housekeeping issue. It’s a brain issue. I am creative. I love colorful and whimsical and cheery. To this day my mother’s favorite word for my home is “loud”, and she’s not referring to the noise level. My kitchen is “Hello Yellow” with every color of the rainbow stuffed in. How I’ve survived twenty years of white cabinetry I do not know. When we replaced our kitchen floor several years ago my sweet brother in law asked me what I wanted in laminate….my response was, “Got anything the color of dirt”. I was dead serious, he knew it. I now have “faux” terra cotta tiling, that way I beat the outside world to the punch.
Once when I was in college (where I minored in Home Economics…and no, they didn’t offer a class in general housekeeping, I checked every year.) I was involved in a campus ministry. I had a mentor who meant well but bless her heart just couldn’t get it through her head that I was not likely to conform to her sub-religion and worship at the alter of “organization”. She tried to convince me that “Cleanliness was next to godliness” by arguing that God was a God of order! Well, that much is true. But he’s also the Creator!!! He doesn’t make the leaves on the trees all equal in size or shape. He doesn’t line the clouds up or make rivers run in straight lines. His order runs the Universe and it is whimsical and colorful. At the heart of every thing created he’s there. People who dispute this, that God is in all things must have missed that verse in Matthew where Jesus asks us why we worry about what we’ll eat or wear. He tells us that his Father cares for the little birds and dresses the lilies of the field. Being a flower child myself I relate to this. I know God lives in me. He is the God of order, but he’s also the God of the creative. He loves my neat freak friends just as much as he loves me. I’ve stopped beating myself up because I can’t be like them. In fifty years, if he hasn’t heard my prayer to change me into an organized person it must mean he has other, more important things to do in me. I love that he’s drawn me to people like this…they are still helping me get my house picked up so I can go play. I guess some things never change.
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