My son is moving in. I offered him the bedroom furthest from mine, so that he can make a sandwich at midnight, and I can sleep through it. It was my sewing room, filled to the brim.
On Monday my helper woman took the twin bed apart in the bedroom closest to mine. Then she parked it in the dining room along with my daughter’s headboard. She moved the sewing table that I had cleaned off. She dragged the child’s armoire across the wood floors on an upside-down carpet runner.
I spent the rest of the day hauling and sorting. It was only 35 steps from the sewing room to the new sewing-room location, across from my bedroom. If I ‘d had a fitbit, I’d know how many steps I’d taken that day.
On Tuesday, I sat down and sewed some of the pile of unfinished things, but mostly I dragged more stuff out of the old sewing room to the new one. The closet had sixty items hanging in it. I know this because I counted the hangers on the floor when I was done packing it up. The dresses were from my pioneer outfit business. The shirts were ready to pair up with future dresses. I found shirts with only one sleeve hemmed and ladies’ size shirts mixed in with the girl sizes.
On Wednesday I kept at it. The old sewing room was now swept and dusted, with room-darkening curtains at the window in place of polka dotted ones, all pictures taken down. I also cleared out of the newest bathroom, which would be used by my son. I moved make-up, candles, an earring holder, belts, and shoes from the shoe cabinet down to the dog bathroom, aptly named since the doggie door is there in the wall. My son didn’t want a bathroom where a dog might run inside while he was standing at the toliet. That’s fine with me. I didn’t want to lose access to the only bathtub in the house.
“What if the dogs come in while you’re in the tub?” he asked.
“No big deal,” I said. “They just look at me and go on by. It does get a little cold with the door open.”
I won’t be able to do that anymore with my son at the other end of the house.
The dining room looked like a bomb exploded in it, with stacks of stuff waiting to be integrated into the new sewing room that still had a daughter’s armoire and my sister’s tall dresser in it.
Too much stuff. Who knew that my online business for children’s fieldtrip clothing would come to a grinding halt, first when I wouldn’t agree to Etsy’s new Draconian policies that favored the buyer, and then when the pandemic stopped all traffic to my little website for historical children’s clothes?
The tiny bedroom that is now for sewing has had a revolving door of relatives in it – my youngest, her brother, their aunt, and now a sewing room so that Brother can move in, yet again.
His dad is leaving the state. All three kids had to get their stuff out of his house. Who else would take it but me, their mother? It’s a rule in the mom handbook, until they’ve landed somewhere.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 