Home, sweet home

After I spent a week at my mother's house, I became deeply afraid that my house would become like hers--a small space crammed with teetering piles of collected crap she has no emotional connection with. A dirty, dusty, cluttered space where there's no place to just sit and relax, and no space to spread out.

Frank and I have been trying to declutter our own house and to get caught up on the dusting. This house is chronically dusty, a result of pets, a dry climate, and forced hot-air heat. Dust is my mortal enemy. Nothing aggravates my otherwise-mild asthma faster. Except maybe mold.

There's also the seep-seated hate of dusting that comes out of my childhood. Doing the dishes and the dusting were chores assigned to me at about the age of seven. As a small child, I was overwhelmed by how any things I had to move from any given surface to get to the actual task at hand. Later, much later, I had a job in a shop that carried any kind of high-end, ridiculously priced knick-knack you could think of, from oversized brass jacks to large, porcelain Capodimonte figurines. A big part of my job was to keep these hundred of items dust-free. The tedium of it made me want to keep my own living space free of decorative items that required dusting. I've never succeeded at that, mostly because other people keep buying me doo-dads I don't want. We have boxes of these things in the basement. Boxes.

In the course of my adult life, the level of neatness in my home is always a direct reflection of my mood and overall emotional wellbeing. Since Frank I and I live in such a small house, it doesn't take much to tip the balance from reasonably lived-in to overwhelmed by papers, magazines, bags, books, gadget components, instruction manuals, and who knows what else. Stuff. Just lots of stuff. My mood hasn't been great lately, and so, the piles have grown. I've been feeling claustrophobic, so this weekend we started chipping away at the crap.

The living room has been purged of everything that isn't supposed to be there. The furniture has been dusted, the wood polished, the floor vacuumed, the coverlets washed. I took pictures because it's so rare for this room to be neat and for the coffee table to be visible at all. Next week, we'll start in on the dining room table where several years of paper clutter has been gathered and deposited in anticipation of the world most daunting purge-recycle-filing project.

It's a small room. We've never had a lot of money to decorate, but the couch is a FlexSteel.

When I blog, I'm usually sitting in the brown chair with my laptop.