Month: April 2026

My desk drawer is a mess. It’s always a mess. Even after I tidy it up, it reverts to a mess as soon as I close the drawer.

I think it’s because I do things quickly. I move fast and mess things up fast. But even if I slowed down, it would still be a mess, just a mess on slow bake.

My desk is considered communal property in that it sits in the family room, which means it is a grandkid magnet. You try saying no to 11 sets of big pleading eyes. All they want to do is play office, school, stage a musical, or set up a bank. (Their lending fees are criminal!

The old rolltop desk has two side trays that pull out, a main desk drawer with a maze of small dividers, eight pigeon holes, and six tiny drawers beneath the two cubbies holding letter-size paper.

Wedged in the corner of the desk is an acrylic cube stuffed full of comics the husband has clipped from newspapers. They are like potato chips. You can’t laugh at just one.

The desk is furnished with a 3-hole punch, colorful rubber bands in an old Ball jar, scissors, assorted Post-its, tape (regular and double-sided) and numerous pens, some of which actually work. There’s also an X-acto knife, glue sticks and a monogrammed letter opener that was a gift from our son’s eighth grade language arts teacher for talking to her class. I should have been the one gifting her.

The desk is also home to one of those big red Staples buttons. You push the red button and it says, “That was easy!” We got it for our daughter to punch after she had open heart surgery on her 25^th birthday. These days we save it for other momentous occasions like losing a tooth, finishing every book in the Hardy Boys series, or smacking a wiffle ball into the neighbor’s yard.

Sometimes I’m tempted to say, “The desk is off limits; you’re messing with Grandma’s office.”

I would if I could, but I can’t.

I remember going to my dad’s office as a kid, sitting in his big desk chair on wheels, pulling open the middle desk drawer and gasping in wonder. Ballpoint pens galore. Paper clips. Yellow No. 2 pencils—with erasers even! He had an electric pencil sharpener and his very own stapler! So this was the privileged life of grown-ups.

The most jaw-dropping wonder was the adding machine. The adding machine made a racket as you punched in numbers. The paper chugged and chugged, then the contraption fell silent with a final tally. The machine was right. Every. Single. Time. Tell me again—why did I have to go to school?

Somedays I open the middle drawer of my desk and flash back to prowling in my dad’s desk drawer. Maybe one day these kids will have memories of ransacking Grandma’s desk. I’ll bet two glue sticks, a pair of safety scissors and a jumbo blue crayon on it.

I’ve rotated our cold-weather clothes with our warm-weather clothes so many years, I could do it in my sleep. From the looks of some of our clothes, I may have been doing it in my sleep.

Neither the husband nor I are clothes horses. We’re more like clothes turtles.

I could use some new pants, but I’m waiting until the styles change. The big trend in pants is exactly that. Big pants. They call them wide-leg. I call them big enough for me and a friend.

I’m happy for those who can wear wide-leg and barrel pants. I’m just not in the “in group.”

One of the hazards of being short is that wide-leg pants can quickly turn you into a virtual square. That said, elephant-leg pants do not make me look like an elephant. More like a baby hippo.

Women who can wear wide-leg pants glide, float and move with grace as they sweep across the floor. Yours truly in wide-leg pants is more like a push broom that can’t gain traction.

Palazzo pants are long, wide, flowy and shout, “Gondola ride in Italy, followed by cannoli.” I can’t wear palazzo pants; but I love the name. By the way, “palazzo” is Italian for “palatial building.” Why, yes, I think I’ll buy some palatial-building-size pants today. “Oh miss, do these come in the Trump Tower size?”

It doesn’t help to pull big pants up higher. A waistband around your neck tends to draw attention, and not the flattering kind.

Sorting our winter and summer clothes from his and her boxes, I hurriedly grabbed a pair of navy blue chino shorts and slipped them on. The weight loss was shocking. They hung below my knees. I’d lost a dramatic amount of height as well as weight! Then it dawned on me that I had dumped the tubs holding his clothes and my clothes into one big heap. I had grabbed his shorts, not mine.

All thoughts of an extra-large pizza and intentions of adding ice cream to the grocery pickup order immediately vanished.

My husband has no interest in shopping for clothes or buying clothes. To his knowledge, he has not bought more than three or four shirts, two pairs of pants and one sports jacket in our entire marriage.

I buy his clothes and quietly replace the old with the new. He thinks he’s easy on clothes and I let him. Why spoil 47 years of wardrobe happiness?

I love a clean car—no trash on the floor, no empty plastic water bottles rolling around, no fossilized fries smashed into floor mats. A clean car makes me happy.

Sometimes, if the car is clean on the inside and the outside, I’m so happy I throw it in park at red lights and car dance like crazy.

Not really. But I’m car dancing on the inside.

You see advertisements during gift-giving holidays with women gazing doe-eyed at expensive jewelry and wrapping themselves in designer clothing. I volunteer to be the woman in the ad nuzzling the booklet of carwash tickets.

In the greater scheme of family, I stand somewhat alone in my fanatical love for a clean car.

Not to name names, but our son and his family drive a minivan that’s basically a Walmart on wheels. There’s fruit, snacks, drinks and coffee cups in the grocery section; stray socks, mud boots, work boots and hoodies in clothing; power tools, fishing gear and a large medical emergency kit (because with five kids you just never know) in general merchandise; and a violin, mandolin, banjo and guitar are crammed in the rear storage area in the event of a spontaneous bluegrass jam.

If you need it, they’ve got it.

Self-checkout is in the front passenger seat.

Our youngest, who teaches preschool three days a week, drives a vehicle that is a craft and entertainment center on wheels. She could raise the tailgate and do pop-up craft centers. What’ll it be? Glitter glue or popsicle sticks?

She never leaves home without an array of card stock, safety scissors, pipe cleaners, and wide assortment of sing-along-CDs and books on tape. Oh, and educational flashcards: presidents, states, animals, vegetables and minerals. I’m pretty sure she keeps a laminator and paper cutter in the back storage area.

As for medical emergencies, she’s equipped for anything from motion sickness to small cuts requiring bandages with cute woodland animal pictures on them.

Because she hauls huge piles of teaching supplies in the front passenger seat, if she picks you up to go somewhere, it’s always a question of, “Do you sit on all the stuff or does all the stuff sit on you?”

Overcome with a renewed commitment to keeping a cleaner car, she recently gave it a thorough cleaning. One of her nieces came over that same day and ran into the house yelling and screaming, “The door to your van is open and there’s nothing inside! I think you were ROBBED!”

A document detailing our healthcare expenditures just arrived in the mail.

“Shocking,” I said.

“You mean the cost of healthcare?” the husband asked.

“No—documentation that we are officially fixer-uppers.”

There it was, right before our eyes. Three months of physical therapy for a back injury from lunging into the far back of an SUV to retrieve a coffee cup.

Did you know strong glute muscles are key to a strong back? Well, now you do. That’ll be $4,000, please.

The lengthiest charges are for steroid injections and three months of physical therapy for the man who thought removing the roots of a 40-year-old maple tree by himself would save us money. Who would have guessed swinging an axe seven hours a day for five days would mean two frozen shoulders?

There was a lot of picture taking featuring x-rays and scans. Our modeling fees are exorbitant.

On the upside, our bodies may hurt from time to time, but our knowledge of medical terms and anatomy has never been better. Hip bone connected to the back bone, back bone connected to the credit card.

The door to the linen closet is the only thing between us and an avalanche of  prescription meds and over-the-counter remedies: vitamins, painkillers, nasal sprays, allergy meds, eye drops, antibiotic creams, bug bite creams for the grands, cough syrups for infants, toddlers, and adults, some artificially colored and some dye-free, all in the fruit flavor of your choice.

Even the kitchen screams, “Send help.” There are protein drinks and mineral waters in the ‘fridge and a 4:1 ratio of large blue ice packs to food in the freezer. There’s an XXL ice pack in the freezer in the garage, big enough to cover an entire back.

Pink 2-pound weights that make our Army veteran son-in-law laugh out loud sit on my desk. The laundry area is where you’ll find the rice-filled neck wrap you heat in the microwave, then sling around your neck when you can’t turn your head.

The husband just came home from the gym and flipped on the TV. “There was a show on HGTV where a crew tried to restore a 100-year-old house and the whole thing collapsed. Want to watch how it turns out?”

“No thanks. The concept hits too close to home.”