I'm Spring Cleaning in the Fall

Leap of Faith, here. I'm de-cluttering my writing room. Taking pictures here so I can show you how nice and clean it will be after Sunday night, when I'm done! Like tossing your cap over the fence (which means you have to scale the fence to retrieve it).

I have piles of things I want to do sometime in the next year. Some things I intended to do 6 months or a year ago and never got to. I have stuffed into boxes a craft project I started too late for Christmas last year. My nose was tweaking the more I sorted through the boxes just to see what I hadn't looked at in over a year!  Dust!


When I sold Real Estate full time, every time I cleaned my desk I would do an extra piece of business that week. Didn't mean it was something I found that I needed to followup on, but the de-cluttering space I now occupied helped me be more focused, more in tuned with my customers. But it was almost a joke, as my staff would wait for that phone call that would come some time in the next  7 days, bringing a new customer. Like God was rewarding me.

A lot of my nice things were destroyed when our house burned down in 2008. We've been in the new house now just over a year. Still incomplete, I discovered I designed a house that was bright and light, with wonderful two story walls and windows, including a huge roll up garage door window in my dining room, but did not plan into it any storage. So, closets, like this one, are few and far between, and have become catch-alls.



I'm reading a book on Simplicity, making do with less. Seems to be something a lot of people are struggling with. Making do with less money, less things, less complications. I'm even doing with less weight, having lost 40# since May, and that definitely means a lot less of the binge foods that got me to my predicament. And, like my closet and messy writing room, putting off until later that time when I should diet and watch my weight, my body became cluttered with extra baggage.

Not any longer.

Truth is, I have a beautiful home, glorious in all ways that are important to me. I love how the music wafts up to the second story, and the grand living room feels like a sanctuary of sound when I play my favorite CD or listen to Sirrius. I play the Spa channel all night long.

So now God gave me this second chance to live here in this new space. Time to act like I deserve it. Watch for my next post where I will proudly display that I've cleaned up my act.

Sharon

Houses

Our house burned down in 2008 and in an instant, everything about our lives changed. I was reduced to only the clothes on my back at the time of the fire: a white nightie. Barefoot and cold, I couldn't believe I was actually watching the house burn, watched as memories and valuable things went up in smoke, taken away in less than twenty minutes.

We slowly began the painful process of arguing with the insurance carrier and negotiating our policy limits with our lender, who was also experiencing troubles of their own: they became insolvent shortly thereafter. We went from one fire to another.

In the meantime, I began cutting pictures out and looking at what I wanted the rest of my life to look like, what my next house would look like.

I stumbled upon a great book: Moving On, by Sarah Ban Breathnach. She talked about putting back together the pieces of her life after a painful and all too public divorce. I could relate. My life felt like one big ugly public divorce, even though my husband and I were still married.

She talks about how there is this special relationship between a woman and her house. She even suggests that some women don't really want a divorce, they just want a new house. How important it is to have a House of Belonging. A place where good things happen, a stage, a canvas, a blank page.

Soon after the fire, and during the creative endeavor of creating a new house, I began to write. And the writing healed me. Fed me. I stumbled, quite by accident, on my true calling.

I'm going to quote her because Sarah says it much more beautifully than I ever could. As a romance novelist, these words touch the seat of my soul:

"...meditating on the emotion women feel when they fall in love at first sight with men; I'm the one making the leap to house fever because I've succumbed to both. Suddenly, without warning (or so it seems) the trajectory of a woman's life changes, becoming "a vicarious route to some essential part of herself that she does not yet fully recognize or understand." The Beloved becomes "the heroic territory she longs to occupy."

She thinks she's found him--or home. Interestingly, the name of the greatest lover of all time, Casanova, means "new house."