Animal prints and Nantucket reds

I am completely exhausted. You see, I put away my clothes last night.

This is a colossal undertaking.

What happened is, I put it off, and put it off, and put it off, and finally, I just got embarrassed. Like, I could not possibly tell my kids to clean up their room or put away their clothes, because one of them would just walk over to my bedroom, glance inside, and raise an eyebrow.

It was clean in March, I swear to you my room was clean. My mom was here, and she stayed in my room. So in a blind panic before she arrived, I put away all of my clothes, and shoved everything else into the closet.

Done.

But now everything is still sort of in the closet, and then a whole bunch of stuff I have worn since then is on the chair, and then there's the laundry basket at the end of the bed and the shopping bag next to the door and the shopping bag on the other side of the bed and the haphazard stack of random mail/magazines/kid's art over there and the towels (clean! They're CLEAN towels!) on the end of the bed.

So I am going through the stacks and stacks of stuff - clothes, mostly - and I am struck by the disparity.

On one end of the spectrum, I have the Nantucket reds.

A pair of cotton shorts, not too long, not too short, the perfect faded dusty red that says "summer" to my Yankee self. You just want to pull them on and go for a sail with zinc smeared on your nose and maybe a scarf tied around your head.

And then on the other end I have a skin-tight ruched stretch satin animal print dress that puts the goods on full display. It speaks of a far different island - Long Island. And not the Hamptons if you know what I'm saying (and I think you do).

So I am putting away this totally random assortment of clothes, and stopping to marvel over how a person could own a striped polo shirt AND a pinstriped bustier that laces up the back with a wide satin ribbon. It is like four different people's closets, all dumped into one huge pile. I finally get down to the bottom, and realize that the stuff is really, painfully wrinkled. The kind of wrinkled where you have to decide if you are going to iron it, or just donate it to Goodwill, because it is so far gone.

Then you start finding the random shit that had been there from the days when your room was clean. Things you put down just for a moment, that ended up buried under stacks of clean clothes and paperwork.

Like the phone bill.
And 3 library books
And a to do list (that clearly listed "pay phone bill" and "return library books")
(and also "buy heartworm meds for dog" and "send Easter Cards")
(Crap.)

About those Easter Cards.
See, I missed the cut off to send Christmas cards. And then I forgot to send New Years cards until February at which point I thought "let's make Valentines!" So we made two Valentines (I wonder where those ended up? Maybe under that pile of papers over there.......) and then I got distracted and we abandoned the project, along with $40 worth of valentine-themed art supplies (which, really, where is that bag of heart-sha0ped doilies and pink felt??)

I was feeling pretty lame about missing Christmas, New Years and Valentine's Day, and then I thought "Easter! we'll send out Easter cards!" which I dutifully added to my to-do list, here. And then I just put that list down for a minute, and the next thing you know it's May, the phone's been disconnected, the dog is out of heartworm meds, I owe $25 to the library, and I have a stack of cards with chicks and bunnies on the front and not a damn clue what I should do with them.

I think the best thing to do would be to smear some Noxema on my nose, tie this animal print dress around my head like a turban, pull on these red shorts, and go take a nap in my neighbor's boat that's parked across the street.