With the homecoming of C2 after five months out of the country, her immediately starting work full time until Christmas break was over (which meant a good twelve or more hours a day with the commute, with the prize going to the 18-hour day thanks to King County’s embarrassing snow/emergency non-plan), getting ready for 23 people here for dinner on Christmas, and the recent unusual snowfall here, the house was a bit cluttered. In an effort to keep me from burning everyone’s possessions so there would be less potential mess, I put a small basket in the entry way to collect gloves, scarves, and other assorted snow gear (gear that we seldom have reason to use) that is easily lost in the mess of everything else in the entry way. Usually, people around here drop their things right next to the appointed collection receptacle, but one morning I noticed that C2 had uncharacteristically made use of the small basket just inside the front door: Her pants were in it.
Besides having to make peace with the emotional aspects of getting back to the wet, cold, gray real world after spending five months in the fantasy land of study abroad in a nearly tropical climate with fabulous new friends who don’t go to bed until daylight breaks, C2 had to get ready to go back to school while working full time. I’d like to think that is the reason that her room looked like this two weeks after arriving home,
but it’s not. That this mess is confined to ground zero is only because I was careful to move everything into her room and shut the door. If not, wherever she’d dropped her bags, which was about two feet past the front, would have looked like this.
Note to self: the next time I ask her if she’s ready to leave in the morning for the move to an apartment three hours away and she says “Yes, I just have to pack my clothes” when her room looks like this, remember that she is lying.
I cannot figure out why she’s developed these habits. You’ll have to excuse me now because I have some Santa Clauses and Christmas lights to think about putting away.
