I last cleaned the dining room table sometime in early fall, judging from the dates of the magazines and catalogs I just tossed into the recycle. But this morning, as I ate breakfast and read the online papers, I realized that the piles had reached the point where I felt surrounded, and as usually happens when I feel buried in junk, I snapped and spent 45 minutes I didn’t have sorting and trashing. NATURE and NEW YORKER, I kept. Unread issues of HGTV and This Old House, for the refurb/rehab ideas. A couple of seed catalogs, because I haven’t yet given up the idea of a veggie garden this year. Everything else was hasta la vista, baby.
(Note to magazine publishers–packing the issue in a tough plastic bag in order to protect the oversize subscription card is utter bs, and simply means I need to use the good scissors on you before I consign you to the recycle bin)
But I digress.
I excavated assorted coins. Two dollar bills. One of my nice pens. The spare house keys. I now have a surfeit of table surface, and I feel better. We’ll see how long it lasts.
I keep telling myself that I should trash the stuff before it even gets in the house–I enter via the back door, and keep the recycle bin Right There just for that purpose. But I slip sometimes, and the slips add up to piles, stacks, and in the end, Sunday morning mayhem.