Making a Clean Sweep

Now that Spring has sprung and summer is almost over, I’ve suddenly been bitten by the Spring cleaning bug. I know it is rather late in the day but, cliched as it may be, better late than never. Besides, I can still take comfort in the fact that though my summer is coming to an end, in many parts of the world, it has just begun or yet to begin.

Tidying up seems to be my latest driver because I am in the process of tidying up my Internet presence and identity. I feel almost like Sybil (Flora Rheta Schrieber’s book about a patient with the same name) as I re-integrate my different identities, blogs and accounts. Finally, having made some kind of sense of the blogosphere, I’m ready to start all over again.

It is no wonder then that I have spent the greater part of the morning tidying up my cupboard. There’s nothing quite therapeutic as tidying up a cupboard, which I often feel is a metaphor for one’s life – a tidy cupboard is a tidy life with all the loose ends neatly tied up and everything in its place. There was a sense of calm that descended on me as I took out all the sheets and towels, opened them up and folded them back, piling them neatly one on top of the other.

But even though I tidied only two shelves, it pretty much took the whole day because this was an activity I did among other household chores. Besides, when the contents of the cupboard came out, there were several things that had me remember when I first got them like my first pen, my first sari, the cheque book that I’d thrust inside hoping to keep it back in its rightful place……These digressions make tidying even harder to finish so when my 2-year-old grandson entered my room for his siesta, he took one look at the pile of clothes and instinctively said “What a mess” using the appropriate intonation and facial expression!

So while he slept I quickly put things back so that when he woke up, the room was clean.