Neatness Counts?

When I was a young boy, I was as much of a slob as most young boys. I suffered from an extremely permissive and patient mother. She would never insist I clean up; she'd do it. My friends' moms always seemed to be hectoring about making beds, wiping shoes, etc..., but not Sunny. She just wanted my friends and I to have fun, and happily cleaned up after us.

In college, things got to an absurd level. I shared an apartment with 3 other even bigger slobs, and at the end of one school year, we received a bill for "excessive filth." I think it was for about $40 per roommate. My parents paid it, and kept it to show to their friends. We still laugh about it.

Well, over the past 20 years, I've experienced a change. I find I can't stand clutter. I truly prefer a neat, organized house.

Well, Wifey is, um, let's just say she doesn't share this need. Give her 3 surfaces and 4 sheets of paper, and she'll leave it a mess. She's an only child, and the product of 2 obsessively neat and organized folks. In fact, her mother once broke an ankle because her father mopped the kitchen floor for the SECOND time one evening, didn't tell my mother in law, and she skated to a collapse. (The fracture was bad, and cost Wifey and I a trip to Europe, since it left my mother in law incapable of babysitting. Still, the thought of the slapstick-like fall, accompanied, I'm sure, by great Yiddish cursing, brings me a chuckle to this day).

So, I walk around the house asking Wifey to please neaten up, and sometimes doing it myself, but to no avail. "I have a problem, I know," she explains.

MY law partner, seriously OCD, tells me he simply couldn't live in my house, with all the clutter and disarray. I may be getting to that point, myself. We own a 2 bedroom condo a few miles away. After the Ds move out later this summer, I may move there, and enjoy a neat, clutter-free existence.

I'd get the paper each morning, read it, and then place it into the recycle bin. I'd was a dish after I used it. I'd promptly file papers. I'd put away laundry after it dried, instead of leaving it out like an art project, hanging around for weeks, which is what happens in my house...

Speaking of the Ds, D1 is VERY neat and organized. She even gets hired by friends' mothers to organize their lives. I wish Wifey would hire her, too.

D2 --the WORST! She takes off clothes and leaves them scattered on the floor. Our aging Labrador sleeps in her room, and can be seen nightly pushing piles of clothes aside with her nose to find a piece of floor to curl up.

D2's about to share a dorn this Fall. I await the returns on THAT experiment. I also suspect that, like me, she'll become less of a slob as she gets older.

So, we're leaving for Gainesville soon, and the house is a mess. Wifey "straightened up: last night, and there are still an impressive amount of papers strewn about. To use this computer, I had to move 2 piles of "works in progress" away from the keyboard. Dried clothes hang in the guest room at least since last week, like vines in a rainforest.

I guess I'm becoming much more like Felix in the "Odd Couple," and that can be annoying to Wifey. As she said, I'm the one who changed.

I'm going to go get the paperwork for today's trip. If only I could find it...