My daughter-in-law got on a cleaning spree a couple of weeks ago and inspired my husband and me.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this; I’m not nesting,” she said. My granddaughter is almost 11 weeks old now, and my DIL is on maternity leave. Being home day after day, you start looking around and noticing what needs to be fixed or cleaned or decluttered.
It can drive you crazy.
My DIL especially has gotten tired of seeing items placed on top of her kitchen cabinets, a little trick my 6-foot-4 son likes to do.
“I guess he thinks I can’t see up there,” she said.
When my husband and I were visiting our granddaughter, DIL started cleaning out a kitchen drawer.
“Do we need two of these?” she asked our son, pulling out pizza cutters. They had multiple measuring spoons and three can openers, one of which she said didn’t work. My son said it worked fine. She had two carrot peelers and a little plastic mystery tool.
My DIL was happy to find, stuck in the back of a drawer, the serving spoons they got as a wedding present that they couldn’t find.
My son started putting everything they didn’t want into a bag my husband had brought over, despite my husband’s protests. Our son also found a dish towel that was more holes than fabric. He swore it used to be my husband’s — maybe he was swaddled in it at birth, my son joked. My husband didn’t recognize it and told him to throw it away.
My husband, who finished teaching the first summer term at college, has a little free time. He started his own purging the next day. (Anything to put off writing his doctoral dissertation. Boxes of documents are stacked next to our bed. Maybe he’ll sleep-write it.)
He started cleaning the laundry-room cabinets, the cabinet where I store dust cloths and holiday towels, as well as odds and ends. It’s one of those you open, shove something in and close quickly before everything falls out.
There were napkin rings, which are a joke. I haven’t set a table with cloth napkins in 20 years.
This may explain my obsession with paper napkins. I have been hoarding them for years in a kitchen cabinet. My husband actually videoed and sent to me all the decorative paper napkins he had spread out over the countertops.
“Why don’t we ever use paper napkins?” he asked as he videoed the stacks.
It looked like I had pulled off a Hallmark-warehouse heist.
Growing up, and still, my mother buys cute napkins for every occasion. I guess I inherited a fondness for them.
We had Thanksgiving napkins with a cornucopia design; Easter napkins with a little bunny; Halloween napkins that had “Boo Y’all” imprinted on them and some that said “It’s all about the candy”; several kinds of “Happy Birthday” napkins, including some superheroes from my 20-something sons’ long-ago birthdays; and New York napkins with the Statue of Liberty on them.
Plus a stack of leftover gold paper plates and napkins from my son and DIL’s wedding almost three years ago.
My husband asked me to sort through them. I got rid of the superheroes napkins and some plain ones.
The next day, my husband moved to kitchen-utensil drawers. He started texting me before-and-after photos. The kitchen is his domain; he can organize it any way he wants.
Then he started cleaning out his bathroom drawer. He found several pairs of lost fingernail clippers and an unrecognizable falling-apart blob of plastic with about five bristles that 40 years ago was a hairbrush. He will not throw it away; I’ve tried. He got it out of the trash. I do not understand the attachment.
I got the organizing bug, too. I pulled out my top bathroom drawer and cleaned as we watched TV. I threw away all kinds of products that promised to make me look younger and less wrinkled. When will I learn?
It felt good to toss things into the trash, although I’d have a change of heart and retrieve about every third item.
We’re making progress, drawer by drawer, but we’re not finished.
My husband’s classes start Aug. 24, so he’s got time to keep cleaning.
Who needs a doctorate when you can have an organized junk drawer?
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.