My beloved wife is organized. 

I am organized in certain small ways that obsessively organized people would laugh at.  For example, I toss stuff on my dresser for filing. Things like my socks and underwear and statements about my retirement account and instructions manuals and spare parts from appliances and extra screws and batteries.

They end up in a jumble on my dresser, but, as happened just yesterday, when my dresser will hold no more without cascading the load onto the floor or risking great avalanchial harm to the cat, Riley Wiley Porter, who often sleeps atop the mess, I move the entire pile to the bed, sort it into proper piles, and put each pile where it truly belongs.  My dresser is ready to go again, and the top does not even need dusting!

That is organization even if it does not meet the standards of the Adrian Monks in the reading audience.

In my work shop, I can work blindfolded and lay my hands on any tool.  I don’t work blindfolded, of course, particularly around my power tools, because to do so would mean that soon I would have no hands to lay on my tools. That is organization, even if it does not look tidy to the casual observer.

But, Marsha is organized.  Always has been. It is a strength. 

I take care of the recycling in the house.  I don’t let it pile up.  My rule is that when any one of the various recycling containers is full, it is time to make a trip and get rid of it all.  I do not start stashing things in the basement and letting it pile up into a huge project.

Oh, sure, there have been times when I’ve been known to store some of the larger cardboard boxes in the back of the van for a few days to stall off the trip to the recycling center, but that does no harm, does it?

(I should note that I do for one good reason miss the old polluting days when I was a kid and we had a burning barrel in the back alley behind the house.  My brother and I were charged with the task of burning all of the household trash every day, so we often had a few wooden kitchen matches in the back pockets of our jeans.  The good reason I miss those days is solely based on the day I watched my brother fall off his sled halfway down Munger’s Hill and travel the rest of the way down with his arse aflame.)

But, back to my story, and here’s the thing:  Organized Marsha does not throw catalogs away.  She files them in alphabetical order in a secret room somewhere in our house.  Hundreds of them. Why?  Search me.  After all, if you want to order something from Lands End or L. L. Bean, just wait a day and another catalog will arrive---you don’t have to go to the secret room and look for an old one.

About once each year, she apparently decides that there is no reason to do this, and, quite without warning, a huge neatly stacked pile---more of a bale, actually---of catalogs appears in the hallway outside our bedroom.  I have no idea where the secret room is where she keeps this Fort Knox of third class mail.  I could probably locate it by noting which side of the house is tilting just before the pile appears in the hallway.

Today was the day it appeared.  It took me many trips with many plastic bags to haul the trove to the van and then to take it to the recycling center.  I pity the poor truck that has to lift that particular dumpster. 

Tomorrow, when the mail comes, it will start all over again.  Come to think of it though, so will the pile on the top of my dresser.
                                  Jim Whitehouse

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