Mess Blindness

The whirlwind has settled into a breeze. I submitted the digital image of my art quilt last week with a day to spare. I got everything squared away for the writing conference and attended it this past weekend, made the drive there and back without incident, and learned a lot in the workshops and sessions. I should be able to take a deep breath and relax as life gets back to normal routines, right?

 Wrong, apparently. I woke up this morning after a good night’s sleep in my comfy bed with my husband and cat. As I walked to the kitchen for my cup of coffee, I looked around at my living room and dining room. It stopped me for a minute.

 Where did this mess come from?

 What mess, you ask? Oh, the iron and ironing board pushed up against the hutch, for one thing. The sewing machine on a chair, for another.  Two large tote bags with the detritus of my quilting project spilling out of them on the floor by the table, for a third.  Also, a variety of rulers—from a 6-inch mini to a 15-inch square and a 36-inch yardstick—stuck into the sewing machine carrying case. Hmm, maybe that’s why the machine is on a chair?

 And there’s more, mostly stuff I neglected while finishing the quilt and getting ready to leave for Austin. Teetering towers of papers threaten to collapse on every table in sight. Thread fragments and bits of fabric litter the floor. When was the last time I vacuumed? I have no idea, but my cat has batted things around, artfully distributing the mess as widely as possible.

 Michael hasn’t attempted any remediation that I can see, and I don’t blame him. The potential for doing inadvertent damage to something important to me is a powerful deterrent to action. Better to ignore the mess than incur my wrath. (Although I don’t think I really do wrathful...much.)

 However it happened, I can’t ignore it. There are no elves coming in the night to tidy up for me. I don’t have a magic wand or even a cleaning lady. Michael has no idea what to do with this stuff and it would take too long to explain it to him on an item-by-item basis. I have to face it: my next big project is to clean up from my last two big projects.

 Sigh.

 This is life, right? Wear clothes, wash clothes. Eat meals, buy groceries. Oh yeah, buy groceries, unload the car and put them away. Bake a cake, wash the dishes. At least on that one, you get to lick the bowl first and eat dessert after!

 Everything we do requires us to clean up in one way or another.  

 Maybe it’s a sign of adulthood when you stop being surprised by this fact and just do the work. In that case, I relapsed to childhood momentarily. It could be that focusing so intently on getting ready for the conference gave me a kind of mess blindness: I was too busy to see the trail of domestic destruction left in my path.

 But I see it now, despite my fervent desire to be oblivious, and I know what this week has in store for me. Ready, set, go!

 What has ambushed you this week? What is it that you can’t put off or avoid any longer? We all have something!

 Ciao