Our Clutter Spot

In every place we've ever lived, Joyce and I have had a "clutter spot"--a place where (somehow? magic?) our quotidian clutter ends up congregating.

In our current house in Hudson, where (I just realized) we've now lived for twenty years (the longest residence of our lives), the Clutter Spot has become our "dining room" table.

I say "dining room" because we kind of don't really have one. We have divided a long sort of social room into part "dining room" part "living room." There is a room adjacent that probably ought to be our dining room, but it's become, instead, a sort of library ... well, one of our sort-of libraries. But that's another (sad) story.

what should be our dining room but isn't

The maple table, by the way, is a gift from my parents. It had been theirs during their years at Hiram College (1956-66) and Drake University (1966-late 1970s), but when they retired and moved out to Cannon Beach, Oregon, they downsized, and Joyce and I benefited from their largess, swooping in to claim the dining room set before it really got on the radar of my two brothers.

Anyway ... the Clutter Spot ...

We don't often enter the house via our front door--for a couple of reasons: (1) habit, (2) our garage is more or less by the side door, so that has become our most frequent site of egress and ingress.

And right inside that side door is ... the dining room table.

So ... stuff we carry in from the car, the mail, the newspapers, the magazines, the what-do-we-do-with this? stuff--all/most of it ends up on the dining room table.

Until ... we're having someone over (rare, oh, so rare) ... the folks who come to clean the house (every two weeks) are due for a visit ... one of us (usually Joyce) gets disgusted enough to attend to it. (Her favorite ploy: piling things on my desk chair in my study.)

But right now, 'tis I who am getting "disgusted enough" to do something. Right after I post this (I swear!) I'm going to clean the sucker off.

And then wait for the mailman ...

And I'll post a "clean-table" pic tomorrow ... or whenever ...