The Perfect New Year's Celebration: Shelves

Preamble: My husband and I met, in person, two years ago today at the Portland International Airport. Anniversaries, even small ones, should be celebrated. They are turning points, and turning points, like it or not, got you where you are today. If that’s a good place, hooray! Celebration is in order. If it’s not such a good place, have you grown? have you learned? are you a step closer to where you want to be, or do you know better what that next step should be? Hooray! Celebrate that, too. (This really is related to my post. Really.) 

Like many of you, one of my resolutions for 2010 is to destress, and for me, to destress begins with deep breathing... and then takes an immediate left and heads to the task of cutting clutter and making order out of chaos. I wouldn’t say I’m a perfectionist (okay, that’s a lie), but organization brings me peace of mind. No mad scramble for pen and paper while on the phone. No midnight run to the inconvienence store for a 9 volt when the smoke detector goes on the blink. No worry about enough clean towels or extra pillows for unexpected guests.

For nearly two years — once I knew I was going to marry my husband and that I would be moving into his home — I have been asking, pleading, cajoling and otherwise nagging him to put more shelves in a couple of closets. At last, while he was on Christmas break from school for two weeks, on the very last day of that vacation, he gave me five new shelves. Oh, the storage. Oh, the opportunity to organize, the chance to purge!

You have to understand. Not only did I move into my husband’s home, I moved into his family home. (It is a very long story, and all I will say is that on fair-minded days, it provides cozy warmth and ample fodder for my quips and stories. On a foul-minded day, ample fodder for my rants and raves.) Though it was and always will be “Grandma's House” to the family, it is ours now — a mid-1950’ split level and all that goes with it, or should I say, all that doesn’t go with it. Apparently in 1956, the only good reason to put an electrical outlet in a bathroom was so a man could use his electric razor, and so there is only one outlet in our pink-fixtured bathroom, and it is wired w-a-y up into the light fixture. (I won’t even discuss the maneuvers to which I must resort to actually use my hairdryer and then later, once it has had time to heat, my curling iron, as long as no one gets thrifty and turns the light off, thus dousing power to The Outlet). Little use for outlets then and seemingly little use for shelves. What was their purpose 50-some years ago? To separate His towels from Hers? To segregate bath linens from bed linens? I wasn’t alive then, and I dare not ask my mother-in-law for fear of insulting her house. I will never be sure of the purpose of two shelves in a closet, but I am sure that more than two shelves is a very good thing.

So now there are three new shelves in the closet of the pink-fixtured bathroom and three more in the hall closet — and, to my husband’s complete bafflement, many of them are still bare. “Why do shelves make you so happy?” he asks. I wring my hands in anticipation, luxuriating in the thought of the so-many-things-that-need-a-place finding their place on one of those shelves. “Because, honey,” I say. “They help me relax.”