Can’t help being a real fussbudget

Are you like me? Do you have all sorts of almost-usable scrub brushes, dish towels, old magazines, cute nick-knacks, etc., piled in corners of your cupboards and closets? My brain seems to go into gridlock when I try to clean out the ac­cumulation of decades.

When I moved my mother from Mesa, Ariz., into my house, we sorted through the load of boxes — some of which remain to be sorted to this day, three years after her death. Sorting her stuff wasn’t much easier than deciding what to do with the flotsam of my own life.

I’m coming to the conclusion that unless something has seri­ous sentimental or real value, it should be given or thrown away. This conclusion, coupled with a desire to simplify my life, has led to a lot of standing around, gazing at the piles of junk.

As a corollary to this predic­ament, I’ve noticed that certain familiar objects gradually grow grime. Dirt accumulates so slowly that it doesn’t reach the level of my consciousness until it’s really gross. Yester­day, I realized I hadn’t washed my vent brush and rat-tailed comb in a very long time. I filled the sink with warm, soapy water and took a scrub­ber to them.

It felt so good when they stood shiny and clean that I tackled my blusher, lipliner and eyebrow brushes.

I’ve always been a tidy, fas­tidious person (at least that’s how I like to refer to myself). My family sometimes describe me a bit less positively — like fussbudget, picky and uptight. When I get on one of my clean­ing highs, I remember the year I was 10 and we lived on the homestead in Alaska.

As the eldest of four sib­lings, I was given plenty of opportunity to demonstrate my “mature” personality. I washed dishes, swept and mopped floors and operated the gas­fired washing machine. I espe­cially liked cranking the hand­operated wringer clamped to the washing machine.

I enjoyed showing off my skills and reveled in the notion that I was just like Grandma Paxton, my mother’s mother, whose domestic and culinary skills I much admired. But sometimes my enthusiasm outdistanced practicality.

For instance, there was the time I was seized by a need to sterilize everything and boiled the toothbrushes (I think I’d read a graphic book about bac­teria). I put the toothbrushes into the copper tank of water that sat on top of the drum stove. I was quite surprised when the handles melted and the bristles floated to the sur­face.

Since the homestead was a 50-mile round trip from the nearest store, my escapade meant halitosis and fuzzy teeth for a week or two until a buying trip. We even tried the pioneer tooth brush of a chewed willow branch.

The great tooth brush epi­sode helped me appreciate the concept of unintended conse­quences and further reinforced my conviction that help from above is essential in every aspect of life, even the most mundane.