Hurry, Getting Organized season almost gone ~ January 4, 2006

David Heiller

“All right, that’s enough.” The top Tupperware drawer wouldn’t close. Plastic lids and dishes of all description lay in a jumbled heap. Some had fallen onto the floor.

I pulled out the drawer, set it on the counter and took everything out. I put the round dishes together, and the square ones together, the rectangular and rhomboid ones together too. The lids, few of which seemed to match the shapes of said containers, went into a large bin of their own.

Then it was the same with the bottom drawer. Bottles were rejoined with their lids and placed in the back. Old Rubbermaid friends were reunited. Everything went back in place. The drawers miraculously had a lot of room to spare, and they shut just fine.

The whole process took about five minutes. “Wow, thanks,” Cindy said with true appreciation in her voice.

Nuts and screw and bolts and what-not:
Davids organizational bug-a-boo.

Something was going on here, I thought to myself. Just one late-December day earlier I had torn apart my little workshop in the barn. Cleared the counters, brushed off the dirt. Put the bags and containers of screws in the cupboards. Closed the lid on the Korean War ammunition canister that now holds sandpaper. I even swept the floor.

Then I went searching for a bolt fοr a garden implement I was repairing. It’s usually a daunting task searching the three-pound coffee can full of old bolts. Not that day. I carried it into the house, along with two empty ice cream buckets and a smaller plastic dish. Then I sifted through about 2,000 bolts, sorting out the screws and washers and nuts, and putting them all in their own containers. I never did find the right size bolt, but that didn’t matter. It just felt great getting organized.

Getting organized. That’s the season we are in right now. We have a lot of mini-seasons that fall between the big four. This one seems to hit every year about Christmas time.

Maybe it comes with a little free time from work. We need those spells to take a fresh look at things. It also probably stems from the need to get out of the house and the crazy times that holidays can inspire within the domicile. “Ah, honey, I have some important jobs to do in the shop, like inspect the handles on my hammers.”

But the main thing is a New Year drive. Not the false promises that we make to ourselves to knock off the Christmas cookies and lose some weight. No, this is deeper than bogus New Year resolutions. A new year is dawning. The solstice has come and gone. Days are getting longer. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

We hear it on the news a little bit, but we feel it in our bones, from way back, from our grandparents carrying in a bucket of tools to sharpen by the woodstove. From Uncle Cro-Magnon chipping a new edge on that spear tip, and putting it in a pile with the other Clovis points, and putting the hammer stones and scrapers in their own piles like he’d been meaning to do for a couple months but those darn mastodons wouldn’t give him a day’s rest. And Mrs. Magnon’s grateful “Ugh, rahgra, hattamatta” was a heartfelt thank you that has carried all the way down to Crooked Creek Township and Cindy Heiller.

So ‘tis the season. Get organized. But hurry. I can already feel it slipping away. Pass the cookies.