mulberryshoots

my favorite scarf . . . lost for months, and now found!

Well, I have stuck to my guns and done some marathon cleaning out this Labor Day weekend. Along the way to my delight, I discovered that PBS was running a “Downton Abbey” marathon of clips from yesteryear.  So, it’s kept me company while cleaning up – a very nice accompaniment, I must say – and I highly recommend it if you want to turn it on while it’s still running. It’s amazing all the plot lines and wonderful dramatizations – from Mr. Bates’s FIRST murder conviction (of his estranged wife) to Anna’s incarceration accused of killing Mr. Green? or was it Bates again? Finding the ticket in the coat and tracking down witnesses who finally free Anna by the pair downstairs (Mr. Moseley and Baxter, the seamstress lady) hasn’t come up yet but I’m hoping it will before the marathon runs out this weekend!

This morning, I’ve managed to go through re-sorting some of my wardrobe, reorganizing my shoes/boots and setting them on the shoe rack after vacuuming it out. Then, I put my two purple dresses and another plaid one into the long see-through wardrobe bag. Then, I was delighted to find the black plaid shirt that I’ve been looking for . . . and underneath it wound around the hanger were two scarves! I let out a little shriek of joy (that’s the only way to describe it) when I spied the Eileen Fisher ombre grey/blue scarf that I have been kicking myself for losing months ago. (I even searched on eBay to find an identical one but no luck, which as it turned out is probably a good thing!)

In any event, I washed a sweater in Ivory Snow and tucked the ombre scarf into the cool water. It’s now hung up on a towel to dry out on the back deck. And I am clicking my heels together with glee!

So here’s a happy note to cleaning things out – finding my favorite scarf is sparking joy all over the place!

Postscript: It’s two days later and even though we had a full day to the North Shore to see the ocean with Hermine off the coast, I managed to clean out the bathroom cupboards and shelves. And I have discovered the secret of cleaning out messes of lots of stuff pretty quickly:

a) take everything OUT, wipe it down and put stuff into cartons and take it into another room.

b)then sort “like with like”;

c) throw out everything you don’t want and won’t use again.

d) put it back in containers, “like to like”

Simple, right? I had everything unloaded on the kitchen table, sorted ‘like to like.’ What it made me realize was that outside of physical injuries (my broken ankle and George’s pulled back muscle,) that we haven’t been sick in years – no flu, no colds, no bronchitis, NADA.

Now that was worth cleaning out all the bathroom detritus once and for all! YAY!