Two rooms

I've made no secret of the fact I'm a horrible slob as far as my home is concerned - my car, too, most of the time. Except for a brief period when I was about 12 years old, I've been that way all my life.

I think I mentioned this before, but I once dropped a fork on the floor of my den. It lay there literally for months. I must have looked at it a hundred times. But not once did the thought pop into my head, "Huh. What's that fork doing on the floor? I should pick that up and take it back to the kitchen." It wasn't a matter of putting it off; it was a matter of my not being able to see that the fork was out of place on the den floor.

After a half-century of being this way, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that I'm suddenly going to have some transformation that makes me a neatness freak.

Thanks to Ms. HRP, I now have two rooms in my house that are clean: walls freshly plastered and painted, floors newly stained and refinished. The challenge now is to keep these rooms clean, when not a single strand of my DNA inclines me toward tidiness.

I find myself occasionally looking around my bedroom to see if there's anything out of place I haven't noticed before. It's a matter of looking, for example, at the chair and saying, 'All right, what am I seeing here? There's a blanket in the chair, but that's for the dog, so that's OK. There's a sweatshirt hanging on the back. That should not be there; that should be with the laundry.'

I don't think I will be able to keep this up forever.