A little clutter, please!

The first sign that anyone had arrived out of the blue was the vigorous and enthusiastic barking of Bandit, the chocolate Lab.

Then there was the slam of a car door, the turn of the front door handle, and my “grand pug” came barreling up the stairs, followed by my younger daughter.

“Hi Mom,” she smiled as she mustered her way through a pair of wagging tails and canine howdy-dos. “I just stopped in for a little while to clean up my room. We’re having a rummage sale tomorrow.”

Then she disappeared downstairs to what has officially been her bedroom for the past twenty four years, and I stood at the top of the stairs, feeling my moorings start to loosen and my world start to pitch. Who knew that the idea of a bedroom getting straightened up could bring such a sudden feeling of mourning?

I’ve been adjusting to a lot lately, and thought I was doing fine. My older daughter is getting married in a month and a half, my older son is spending his summer living on campus instead of at home, and my younger daughter is moving eight hundred miles away to grad school in two weeks. As they say, denial is not just a river in Egypt.

I’ve been grumbling about the state of that particular bedroom for years. Impassable, impossible, ridiculous, I’ve used many words with four-syllables to describe its state of perpetual disarray. There were little girl things in abundance at first, then high school things—gym socks, sports awards, photos, the leaf litter of price tags and shopping bags and candles and scrunchies and cast-off ribbons and bows. Then, after the start of college and a multitude of art classes, it became also a repository of objets d’art as well. Paintings on canvas, three-dimensional fabric creations, collages, sculptures. The room stood in perpetual gloom because the route across its length to get to the window was a minefield too full of hazards to think of crossing to throw open the shade.

I’ll be the first to admit that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. I don’t have filing systems, I have “piling” systems. The only things I can find for certain in my house are my cell phone, my car keys, and clean underwear. Everything else is up for grabs, dropped on the first convenient square of a few clean inches…or lacking that, on top of other stacks of stuff. Cleaning out my closets just after New Years so that the carpet layers could do their thing in the two back bedrooms was a Herculean effort that took days. And some of the stuff still hasn’t moved back. I know that when I finally reach the "bottom of the barrel" in the biggest laundry basket downstairs, I'll have to do something with the set of furry grey doggie ears I made for her dance recital costume when she was three. They're still there.

But still, I thought optimistically as I periodically surveyed my daughter’s nesting place, some day, the clutter would be cleared and I could put the bedroom to use as a guest room once in a while. The thought filled me with hope.

And then she showed up to clean it up, less than a month before the cross-country move, and it suddenly didn’t feel so good. I busied myself in the kitchen while she worked downstairs, getting ready for the upcoming graduation/bon voyage party I’d planned as a send-off. I finally carried some laundry downstairs as an excuse to visit and see how she was doing.

She sat cross-legged on the floor, sorting, keeping, throwing out. Sunlight flooded the room through the window for the first time in recent memory, and I could see large patches of the pink carpet re-emerge, clutter free. The pastel wallpaper that I'd hung nearly two decades earlier--vertical stripes of pink ribbons and bows, topped with hand-cut scallops of matching blooms against a cream background--shone softly in the afternoon light. She smiled at her progress. My heart sank.

Eventually she declared herself done, loaded the pug and the items for the rummage sale in her car, and we met up for sub sandwiches with her dad and her brother before she left town. There were hugs and kisses and promises to “see you soon!”

I went to the store and drove back to the house alone, trekked down to the lower floor, opened the bedroom door. Sunlight still streamed through the window, while the breeze outside tossed the coneflowers and daylilies in the garden beyond. The room looked more than moderately useable. A few bags needed to be dragged out to the trash, but the bed was clear, as was most of the floor. I took the hit, shrugged, and closed the door behind me.

I moped acutely for the next couple of days. Then my ex-husband called unexpectedly on his way back from her student apartment. He was bringing her bed back to town and needed a place to put it until the last kid might need it for college. Did we possibly have the space in her bedroom?

Sure, I replied, and I scrambled quickly to move dresser and chair, hamper and trash bags from half of the room, and to vacuum the dusty carpet before he showed up. My single goal was to clear enough floor space to stand a queen sized mattress, spring and bed frame on end, and I piled anything in my way back on the bed indiscriminately. More had been left behind than I’d originally thought, and the bedspread was soon invisible once more under sheaves of paper, old cosmetics and empty cardboard boxes waiting to be recycled.

The bed and frame were moved in without a hitch, and when all was settled, I stood back and took inventory. The extra bed leaning against the wall dominated the landscape like a sore thumb, but what I saw made me smile. The room once again looked like a hurricane had gone through it. And once more, I had a job to look forward to doing.