Chapter Two-- page 6

By the time Momma died, all my siblings were grown and gone. Now alone as a single dad raising a way-too-cute-for-her-own-good teenage daughter, Daddy needed help. He invited his widowed mother to live with us. Grandma was very different from my mom: This fact by itself would have made her highly suspect, even if I had not already disliked her for as long as I could remember. Momma and Grandma never really got along. On second thought, that is not entirely true. They got along all right, somehow always managing to be civil to one another, but neither of them had been happy about it.

Grandma was a no-nonsense kind of woman. Nonsense had been my mom’s middle name. Momma coddled children, bought every new gadget, and visited Disneyland once a year. Grandma pinched pennies, crocheted baby blankets out of thrift store yarn, never went to Disneyland, and, as far as I knew, never coddled anyone, most especially herself.

Before moving in with us, my only vivid memory of her was when I was four years old. Grandma came to stay with us one of the times that Momma was in the hospital. She had fixed us kids a proper meal which was to be eaten at a proper table with the proper utensils. In an age of the Red Skelton Show, Man from U.N.C.L.E., Sing Along with Mitch and, best of all, TV trays, we rarely did such a thing. Grandma told me to sit up straight and cut my meat. I didn’t know how, and I must have told her so in a way that she mistook for insolence. She quietly excused herself from the table, walked out to the drainage ditch and cut a willow switch. Without a word of explanation, she spanked me and instructed me to obey. I was a quick learner. I sat up straight, cut my meat and decided from that day forward that she was a mean grandma.

Every little kid needs a grandma-type lady to adore him unconditionally. Grandma Mollart was not that kind of lady, but I had two other old ladies who filled that role quite nicely. My mother’s mother, Grammy, lived in Southern California. Laden with as many presents as the bonnet of her 1962 Chevy Corvair could hold, she came to visit us once a year for the expressed purpose of spoiling us rotten. Her twin sister, Aunt Doll, lived in another house on our ranch, and worked hard at spoiling us the rest of the time. I saw absolutely no need for Grandma Mollart to move in.

She could live with us and try to take care of me, if she wanted to, but I made up my mind not to love her. Grandma was a quiet woman who worked hard and kept to herself most of the time. Not loving her would be easy. Besides already having Aunt Doll to love, I was going to be too busy with school, 4-H, square dancing and boys to worry about Grandma’s impact on my life. Besides that, a couple of weeks after Momma died I started my first job, so I would not really have to interact with her, if I didn’t want to.

I worked at the only dry cleaner and shirt laundry in the county. We washed, pressed, folded and delivered uniforms and linens for the National Guard and most of the hotels and restaurants within a sixty mile radius. It was physically very hot and strenuous work. The shirt laundry department averaged temperatures in excess of one hundred degrees with humidity at around eighty-five percent. I lost about ten pounds in the first eleven days of work and became very, very sick.

I missed work and stayed in bed miserable, sweating and retching. Grandma brought me cool cloths; she changed my sheets, and emptied the garbage pail next to my bed. When I was better, I said distantly, “Thank you for taking care of me. You have been very kind.”

Grandma was visibly taken aback. “Why, darlin’!” she said in surprise, “You’re one of my babies! Of course, I would take care of you: I love you!”

I was shocked, and a little embarrassed. How on earth could she possibly love me? After all, I was only one of her twenty-seven grandchildren. She barely knew me. Worse than that, I was one of the four that belonged to my mother, whom she had clearly never liked. I was afraid to love her back. To do so would have seemed almost a betrayal. Despite my resolve, I opened my heart a crack and decided to give her a chance.

Chapter Two--page 5

I yearned for the type of home life I saw around me. I wanted a home and a family like Carol's, where children were fed neat snacks on pretty plates. I longed to lift a lovely vase of flowers and see a smiling reflection. I wanted to look around me and see a beautiful home to match the shining furniture. I wanted a clean car and a real garage. I wanted a groovy, smartly dressed mom. I wanted a handsome dad who wore a tie to work. I wanted white shag carpeting. I yearned for a manicured lawn where children could play quietly behind a white picket fence.

I adored my parents. I wouldn’t have traded my family for Jill’s or anybody else’s, but I believed that, because our house didn’t look like others, we were different and somehow wrong. I knew I didn’t measure up: What I longed for most of all was a Pledge-polished reflection that was worth a smile.

My heart ached for beauty and order. I couldn't wait to grow up and have a house of my own. I was sure that when I got to be a mom, things were going to be perfect. I confided my dreams with my favorite stuffed duck, Waltzing Matilda. She and I spent my birthday money that year on a box of Grape Nuts and practiced preparing neatly served snacks on little sage-green Melmac plates and cups to my baby dolls out in the playhouse every day.

Eventually I got too old for such things. Waltzing Matilda retired to the Easter basket from whence she came and lived out the rest of her days somewhere in the clutter on the top shelf of my closet. My dad, of course, filled the playhouse with more stuff.

Though I was too old to pretend, I never stopped playing house, and I clung tightly to my secret ideals. Throughout my teen years I diligently honed my skills at cooking, baking, sewing and handcrafts. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, Momma was blind and bed-ridden. She had taught me everything she could, so mostly, I learned by doing. During the summer between my sophomore and junior years, my mom passed away.

Chapter Two--page 4

I was vaguely aware that our home and family looked different than those of my friends. My friend, Andrea, had seven brothers and sisters, a perky mom and a handsome professional dad who wore black horn rimmed glasses and a tie to work every day. Their kitchen had beautiful shiny tile, a gleaming stainless steel sink, and an island with a counter top stove, just like the Brady Bunch. Another friend, Carol, lived in a home with dark hardwood flooring that probably reflected her mom's face when she waxed it. One summer afternoon we played in their carefully groomed back yard while her parents napped. When she awoke, Carol's mom gave us each a nutritious snack of neatly sliced apples served on clean china plates, which she had removed from paper-lined shelves, and cold chocolate milk in pretty little crystal juice glasses. Then she drove us to the movie theater in her clean air conditioned station wagon, which the family kept in their neatly organized garage. At my house we ate cold leftovers from the refrigerator staight out of the Tupperware, drove a Chevy wagon that my sister had crashed into a herd of cows, and on a good weekend, we got paid a penny apiece for every fly we killed.

At my eleventh birthday party a girl named Jill, who lived in a house with a fashionably decorated sunken living room covered in soft white shag carpeting, said my house looked like crap. Her words stung.

Part of me knew what she was saying was true, but I was just a kid, so I didn't understand what made the difference between her home and mine. I thought maybe the difference was money. Maybe if we were richer, we would have a cleaner house. Maybe it was my mom. Jill's mom was a teacher, and mine was a housewife who was sick all the time. Maybe it was because we lived in the country, and Jill lived in town. Maybe town people had better houses. Maybe our house was too big; maybe it was too small. Maybe it was too old; I didn't know. I felt angry at her bad manners, powerless to defend my family, and ashamed that I was somehow different. Mostly, though, I felt longing.

Chapter Two-- page 3

We kids did all of the housework because Momma was not a Pledge-commercial-type lady. She did not flit about with soft white cloths dusting and smiling at the furniture. She did not do the cleaning at all. My mom was sick most of the time. As a young wife, she had suffered through the loss of three stillborn babies. After ten miscarriages, it took her a total of seventeen pregnancies to get four live children. She was diagnosed with diabetes a couple of years before I was born, and when I was just a baby, she got cervical cancer. She survived it, but never really recovered emotionally. In addition to that, the diabetes caused degenerating discs, kidney failure and blindness. Despite her illness, she was a great lover of fun, so when she was feeling well enough to get out of bed, housework was not a priority.

She was probably the most creative and intelligent woman I have ever known, and when she was able to work, she worked hard. Momma could read a cookbook with the excitement and intrigue of a novel, then get up and fix amazing new dishes for supper. She canned bushels of tomatoes from the garden, and at slaughtering time she prepared tons of meat for the freezer. She also loved sewing and every kind of needlework and handicraft. She had shelves, tables, boxes and bins filled with craft magazines, yarn, fabric, paint, ceramics, needlepoint, and Craft-of-the-Month Club kits just waiting for her eager hands when she felt well enough to do them. Like my dad, there seemed to be nothing she couldn’t do. I think the one exception might have been housecleaning.

In our family culture, now that I think about it, once-a-week housecleaning during the hours between cartoons and American Bandstand by four under-skilled, and for the most part unwilling, minors actually made sense.

Chapter Two--page 2

I remember one particular Saturday when my sister returned from spending the night with her best friend, Leah Robinson.

"Did you know that the Robinsons clean their kitchen after every single meal?" she said.

"What? They, like, do the dishes three times a day?" She had piqued my interest.

"Not only that, but they put every dish away in the cupboard and actually clean everything in the kitchen every time! They even sweep and sometimes mop."

"Weird."

I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever clean a kitchen if she didn’t have to, let alone choose to do it two or three times a day. It seemed so impractical.

Of course, we did the dishes. Almost every day. Each of us kids was assigned dish duty for a week; so when the sink was full, or we ran out of clean drinking glasses, the designated washer got to work. If we were really lucky, Momma would burn something to the bottom of a pan. That way we could leave it soaking at the back of the stove, maybe for days. Maybe long enough until it was the next kid's turn. If the pans weren't dirty enough to soak, George would sometimes hide them under his bed until it was Clark's turn. Then Clark had the option to either wash them or to leave them soaking until my turn the next week. When, or if, the pans got washed was a crap shoot. But, all bets were off if our mom needed them for cooking. Eventually one of us would have to do it. Once washed, the dishes rarely made it back into the cupboard. With the balance and skill of circus professionals, we could stack a mountain of plates, cups, glasses, pans and lids to air-dry in a single ordinary dish drainer.

As for the rest of it, RoxAnne and I had kitchen duty every Saturday. We cleaned the kitchen once a week whether it needed it or not. It needed it.

Chapter Two

By the time life had slammed me headlong into the 47 yard dumpster and left me for dead in my own clutter, I was no stranger to change. I had been writing and teaching classes about organization for more than a decade by that time. Most visitors to my home saw it as a peaceful, orderly place, and mostly that was true, if they didn't look too closely. I had already come a long way from my messy upbringing on the ranch.

When I was growing up, housework was strictly a weekend affair. For me, Saturday meant three things: Scooby-Doo, American Bandstand, and cleaning. Getting to watch Scooby-Doo was easy. All I had to do was emerge from my bed and pick the sleep-sand out of my eyes early enough to watch Scooby and the gang, followed by their Hanna-Barbera cohorts, entertain me with their madcap misadventures from 7 to 9 every Saturday morning. If it were a really good Saturday, I could catch the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour, and maybe even Super Friends. Being a Saturday morning couch potato came naturally. I loved it.

Getting the opportunity to watch American Bandstand, however, was not so easy. If I had any hope of giving that new song an 89 "‘cuz the beat was good, but I didn’t like the lyrics," my siblings and I would have to work. The time between cartoons and American Bandstand was always stressful. That was the time we would clean the house.

Don’t get me wrong. When I say "clean," I mean it in only the most technical sense. Cleaning products were sprayed about, fighting and bad tempers ensued, brooms and mops moved from here to there, but our house was never actually clean: Not like Brady Bunch clean, or the house on Bewitched clean or Pledge-commercial clean. You know, on Pledge commercials where the mom lifts the lovely bouquet of fresh cut flowers from the center of the dining room table, sprays the Pledge, wipes it with a soft white cloth, and stops to admire her own reflection on the shiny surface? Uh-uh. Not our house. Never happened.

Saturday morning cleaning always began with my dad and a broom. Our house had concrete floors covered with linoleum, which, I suppose, made Saturday morning clean up so much simpler. Daddy would take a straw broom and sweep everything in his path to the center of the living room into a big pile. Then he would yell, "Whatever is still here in five minutes goes into the trash!" We four kids would scramble to grab cardigans, Barbies, G.I. Joes, moon shoes, stuffed animals, homework and jewelry as fast as our anxious little hands could go because we knew, for sure, that my dad never lied.

Chapter One--page 7

When I refer to 47 yards, I mean cubic yards. A cubic yard is the measurement of a box which is three feet by three feet by three feet. The dumpster was seven feet wide, eight feet high and twenty-three and one-half feet long. With swinging doors in the back that opened to its full width, it could have easily held four square-dancer-bedecked old Plymouths parked end to end and stacked on top one another. By the time we were done, we had filled and emptied it four times at a cost of $500 per dump. We spent $2000, physically exerted ourselves harder than we had since the Disco era, and betrayed our dad's wishes all in one horrendous weekend. We tried to assuage our feelings of guilt by leaving the swinging doors unlocked for scavengers who might want to dig for treasure. That's what Daddy would have done.

After spending three days hoisting mouse-chewed Barbie dolls, broken 78 records from my mom's teen years, unlabeled photographs of people long since passed, drawers full of old grocery and gas receipts, broken tools, rusty cabinets, unfinished craft projects, and piles of dead vacuum cleaners into the dumpster, I became sick. I stayed in my motel room bed for two days, lifting my head from the pillow only to vomit. I doubt that it was the flu or food poisoning: We all ate the same food, and nobody else in the family got sick. I believe it was a very visceral response to the overwhelming pain within my spirit. This was the one final and worst betrayal of all: I was desperately unhappy, and that is the thing my Daddy would have wanted the least. Had he known that storing all that stuff would cause me so much pain, he would never have kept it.

When I was finally able to function, I took the six-hour drive back home with a few precious bits of my inheritance. Ordinarily, Thanksgiving weekend marks the beginning of the Christmas season for my family. We crank up the Christmas music, put up the tree, drink cocoa and deck the halls. Not this year. Too depressed and exhausted to care about Christmas at all, I collapsed on the couch and surveyed the pictures covering the walls of my own living room, my bookcase stuffed with dozens of books, the furniture, knick-knacks, memorabilia, toys and collections that I treasured in my own home. Then I thought about my garage full of unfinished projects, my own basement stacked with storage boxes, my kitchen drawers and cupboards filled to capacity with gadgets, and my craft room overflowing with good intentions. I wondered to myself how much of it my kids might someday be forced to toss into a rented dumpster. Emotionally spent and physically puny, I made the decision to change.