Milestones that wouldn't seem like milestones to anyone else

With the proposal from the auction house pending (and I'm guessing they will want to start taking things out of the house ASAP), I've been slacking off the past couple of weekends when it comes to working on the place and its contents. Only three extra bags of garbage went out this week, and five boxes filled with styrofoam.

But I finally gave myself permission to make two big changes.

There was a rocking chair in the kitchen that was just one piece of furniture too many. No one could sit in it anyhow, since my mother used it as storage. Before her death we took out about three layers of reference books and moved them upstairs, but there were still about seven layers of other things in that chair. Recently I finally got it down to the point where there was just about one armful of stuff remaining.

And so, late Saturday night, with some Dutch Courage inside me, I moved that armful of stuff into the cat chair that my mother used to sit in, picked up the rocking chair, carried it out of the kitchen and out of the house and stowed it in the (locked) big barn.

Then I cleaned the floor. It was a real transformation. A whole world of space opened up. I no longer have to side-step around that chair to get from one end of the kitchen to the other. It's amazing. It's also amazing that the cats still manage to lodge themselves in front of me with all that extra space they could be using!

I dealt with the armful of stuff the next day. A big part of it was just two blankets that need washing before they can go into the cycle of things I use to protect the living room sofa from Pooky, my incontinent cat.

Now, look at that picture above this post.

See the blue child's chair?

That's the main entry to the house, and that blue chair has been troubling me for years. It has to be moved every time I go down the basement. When the door is open, you actually have to step over the chair to get into the hall. When the real estate agent was walking through the house, we both stumbled over it. I told him I didn't know why I hadn't moved it. I said, "Guess I'm still in the mode of not wanting to change anything."

That little blue chair (and the blocks and the pencil tin and the rabbit and the Jiminy Cricket and Pinocchio dolls that were sitting in it, that always fell on the floor every time I walked through) has been relocated to the kitchen space that was vacated by the rocking chair. They're small, they don't trouble me at all in that spot. And both places are so much easier to navigate.

This is all a big deal to me, a major milestone. It may not seem like much to you, and I wouldn't expect it to. But my world is made a little better by it.

I'm sorry, Mom.

-- Freder.