Clutter and Dreaming

Deep inside me lurks a very hidden dream. If I were to even whisper it to my husband, he would roll around the floor in the hysterical laughter of disbelief. My children may be more polite, but I think I would  generally be seen by my family as a messy, cluttered hoarder.

 

What is my dream then? I would dream of being a housewife who, duster and broom in hand, completes all her housework by 9.00 a.m. in the morning, ready to meet the day clean and uncluttered.

 

Where does such a dream come from? I do not know. Was it the Milly Molly Mandy stories of my childhood? Or, maybe Pollyanna who made quite an impact on me. My earliest noticing was that cleaning ladies arrived at 9.00a.m. and went about their work cheerfully and without interruption apart from the occasional chat to the lady of the house, and left at 12.00. My grandmother stayed in her apron until 4. 00 p.m. when she changed out of work clothes to be ready for my grandfather’s arrival home from work.

 

The first time housework was attached to a dream however, was in my childhood. My household chore every Saturday was to vacuum. How I hated that chore. I do remember being reminded to vacuum beneath my bed, and this became my road to freedom. I would lie on the floor with head, hand and vacuum roaring away underneath the bed. Then I would day dream. The minutes fled! Why is it taking so long my mother would ask eventually? ‘I’m just doing a good job’, I would untruthfully reply. Then I began to look forward to vacuuming, but this was Saturday afternoon and well past 9.00 a.m.

 

When I had my own home, my dream re-emerged. The trouble was that my husband was not a morning person at all. I became skilled in quiet morning activities, well away from the bedroom. But the dream lingered.

 

Along came children, five of them. Well, you can imagine what happened to my dream. A dear friend and I decided that if all our young ones were fed, washed, had a bed to sleep in, and clean clothes to put on in the morning, we had completed a successful day. No, housework was not a priority.

 

The children grew, and so did the multi-skilled tasks requiring urgent attention each day. Yet again, the dream of a calm, ordered, uncluttered household quietly dropped to the bottom of my heap of dreams yet again.

 

It resurfaced this week, oddly enough because our printer broke. To accommodate a new one we had to do some rearranging. Ah! Clutter! My eyes found the 600 cassette recordings; each one recorded with love; taking valuable space; moved from one home to the next; how many times? Hoarded!

 

I swept the balcony, the loungeroom and the hallway. Ah! It is only 9.00 a.m. That feels closer to the person I dream of being, but just look at that clutter. I set to work. Weddings, baptisms, services, sermons, broadcasts, music- all going back for at least 40 years when cassettes came in. Most were illegible; the cruelty of it!. We set to one side a precious pile of ones we would do whatever we could to save, while the rest were trashed.

 

I celebrate my many dreams (make what you will of that one!), captured in many of these cassettes. I celebrate sources of encouragement, inspiration and growth. I celebrate joys and sorrows, successes and failures as all being part of my ever-evolving spirit. They are part of me and I do not need these cassettes for confirmation of that. They have passed their use-by date. They have become clutter. I thank them profoundly and let them go.

 

Oops! The floor needs a sweep and it is nearly night time.