Clutter
By Kathryn Atkins, Long Beach Brach
Clutter. It’s everywhere I look. I spend a day (a whole day!) fighting it off, but it rolls right back in like a peeping-Tom wave to a nude beach. This phenomenon is known in family circles as the “Clutter Factor (CF).” Here’s the formula:
Screw the math. If you buy too much stuff, never get rid of it, work and go to school and have a lot of busy people under one roof, your Clutter Factor is high. My husband says I obsess over it, but then, I see it; he doesn’t.
My husband and kids focus on their work, their studies, their music, and their hobbies. I work too, but I rail at the insufferable encroachment of detritus as the work/school week wears on. On Monday, it seeps in the back door; by Tuesday, it washes through the living area; Wednesday finds it sloshing into the bathrooms; and on Thursday, it surges into the bedrooms. By Friday, we are neck deep in it, barely able to crane our necks above it to carry on a conversation. Newspapers, laundry, homework, music, bills, projects, books, invitations, purchases, and pets whirl and spin through the churning sea of our busy lives. Weekends sigh in hopes of stemming the tide. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they don’t.
The Clutter Factor has a companion that lurks shamefully in my very own personality. This sin sister is what I call the “Project Factor.” I own this one. I have three to five projects besides work on the front burners at all times — volunteer stuff, hobbies, things to write, things to read, and more. Because all of these contain anxious due dates, their associated files and piles dot the house like seagulls at a picnic. I am a contributor to the clutter! There, I said it.
To overcome the reprehensible clutter side of myself, I invoke my alter ego, “Buffy the Clutter Slayer.” Buffy wields trash sacks and Goodwill bags, and tears as if possessed through the house. Her ruling mantra: “If I haven’t seen it move in the last five minutes, it’s clutter, and it’s history.” We lost a cat one year. She was too slow.
This last June, Buffy and I cleaned out the garage in a flurry of self-righteous de-littering. My family didn’t speak to either of us for three weeks after that: Buffy threw out their valuable stuff that they hadn’t used in the six years since we moved in. Buffy wants to move. I say we stay. Our clutter defines us and tries to control us, but with Buffy around, it won’t defeat us.
Some days, I actually revel in our clutter: it tells me we’re busy and doing. I don’t trust people whose houses are too clean. Really. It’s un-American.
The very next day as I look across the burgeoning heaps, I grab myself by the collar, pull myself just an inch or so off the ground, and say, “Civilized people don’t live this way.” I strain toward civility as Buffy cleans out a drawer. I wonder if I will ever live a Spartan, monkish existence, wearing a robe with no underwear, and murmuring all day. I wonder if that would make me happy. Probably not. I wonder if it would be okay to have at least one clean room. One? Okay, I’ll take a closet. No? Then, give me a drawer. I’ll take anything. Buffy and I need it.
Or maybe we’re okay . . . Maybe we just need to be happy with the clutter: many folks have nothing at all.
I’ll stop complaining now.
Following a very successful launch party (see “Eight Steps for a Successful Book Launch” under the April 2018 “Craft” tab),
Kathryn Atkins’ new Giving My Self to the Wind
is available and has received high praise.
We’ve excerpted “Clutter” from it.
Read more about the book and its creator
Kathryn Atkins at kathrynatkins.com.