144 Umbrellas

I love umbrellas! I like all kinds. Last summer during my annual 4th of July party it occurred to me to use a large umbrella for sunscreen as I floated around the pool all day. Simply looking so ridiculous made me happy. I got a huge colorful beach umbrella for my birthday this year, and my mind has been hard at work trying to figure out how to plant it in the middle of the pool for this year's party.

I have even been known to use an umbrella in my school lesson plans. The umbrella represented the main idea of the piece of writing and the details hung from little ribbons "under" the umbrella. The rain represented any idea that didn't belong in the writing, and it simply rolled right off the umbrella and onto the ground.

I bet if you think about it, you can remember being a little kid out in the rain with an umbrella. For me it was the coolest thing. The umbrella represented such freedom! I could go outside even if the weather was bad. It made rainy days special. Kind of made me kid-powerful when I graduated to holding my own umbrella.

Yesterday I had an umbrella experience that made me just about as giddy. I bought 144 drink umbrellas for this year's party! Now honestly I do not plan to serve 144 alcoholic drinks. That is not the point. But drink umbrellas make whatever the drink is extra special. They represent fun and relaxation. They are so totally unnecessary and that's what I love about them. The package of 144 of them cost just over three dollars, and somehow I got a charge out of getting the potential for that many luxuries at such a low price. Silly as it sounds, it made me feel rich.

As I write this I wish you many "umbrella blessings" for this summer. Have fun and let me know if you come across a new one!

Cleaning and Morality

Take a look at my office closet. But don't tell my mom you saw it! I'm off for the summer and can no longer find any excuse to put off getting my house in order. In January my water pipes froze and burst in five places, so there was construction until April. My excuse for the last two months is that it was an overwhelming task to tackle at the end of a school year. That excuse has expired.

So this morning I worked on putting my office back together. There were baskets and boxes of things that came out of kitchen cabinets, various stacks of paper, a shoebox full of mints and gum, and a multitude of "home accents." I started by taking down the do-dads. I made my bookshelves look neat. I cleaned up my desk and put any type of paper I came across into a big clear storage box. The do-dads, minus a select few, went in a smaller storage box. I did some creative furniture arranging and it doesn't look too bad in there now. I put the plastic storage boxes in the closet and shut the door. I'll engage with them another day.

After I finished I sat down to have a coke zero, quite pleased with myself for such a big accomplishment. The housekeepers are coming this afternoon and now they will be able to clean in there. But as I was enjoying my success, I kept thinking about that closed closet door. The more I thought about it, the more anxious I got. I'm having company in a couple of weeks, and even though I don't anticipate that they will have any desire to look in the office closet, it prevents me from having that "ready for company" feeling.

This is where the morality question comes into play. I think I and the other members of my family have experienced more guilt in our lives over having a messy house than all other things combined. Not that our house ever really got messy (except for mine when I became an adult, but that's another story.) But I'm telling you, there was serious fear about what our company would think if the house wasn't as clean as it could be. And I guess in a way the fear was understandable because most of our company was family, and they had the same rules about cleanliness.

The company that's coming in a couple of weeks is a little different. They are a chosen set of "sistas." From what I can tell, some of them grew up with the same kind of rules about keeping house, but I'm not sure the guilt is as overwhelming for them. I think they'd still invite me over, even if they didn't have time to straighten up first. And I'm not exactly sure they mind what my house is like.

Best I can tell, the guilt is about appearing lazy, so I guess it does have a connection to most people's sense of morality. But I wonder what it really says about me that my closet looks the way it does. I wonder if I would be a better person if I went ahead and dropped the do-dads off at the goodwill, and got right on that filing project today. But on the other hand, I wonder how much sense it makes to worry so much about what other people think, that I would feel like I had to clean everything up before the housekeepers came so they wouldn't think I am awful for letting it get this bad.

I don't really know the answers to my questions, but there is one cool thing that has come out of this post. My confession about my closet has eliminated some of the guilt. Anybody can look at the picture. There's nothing to hide. Regardless of a person's views about the morality of cleanliness, my closet is my closet. Like it or not. Choose to judge it or not.

I am not my closet.