Messes

I make many messes throughout the day. I clean up plenty of messes, too: cooking messes, laundry messes, paper messes, gardening messes, kids' messes, bathroom messes. What I mean by "mess" is any activity that takes something from its place and puts it somewhere else. Cleaning up that mess is the act of putting all the somethings back where they belong or creating places for the new things created.

By this definition, there are often several messes being made and cleaned up at the same time. Especially during the summer when there are 5 of us "mess" makers sharing time and space.

Well, a week or two ago I ended up taking all of the kids with me to the Landscape Recycling Center for more compost. Why? I don't know. But I had to. I couldn't fold the back seats down like usual, so I had to get creative (and a little risky) with all those 5-gallon buckets filled to the brim with compost. I stacked several on top of each other. It was a short trip home. I took turns carefully. We arrived in terrific shape. Well, some sort of urgent "mess" happened when we got home ("Me gotta use uh potty!" or "I'm starving" or whatever) and I didn't end up taking out the compost right away. The next morning, I unloaded some of it at the big garden, but kids were not cooperating and I didn't get a chance to unload all of it. I frankly forgot it was there until the next day when we were rushing to get somewhere on time. Piano lessons? Can't remember. I took a turn a little too fast and 3 buckets took a head-over-heels spill into the area behind the rear seats.

Huge, huge mess.

Luckily, I had put down a canvas tarp underneath the buckets, so most of the compost missed the carpet. Whew.

Messes that result from some incompetence on my part are especially noxious to me. I loathe to clean them up. I avoid them. I often allow other "messes" to take my time and attention away from such matters, especially since this mess was mostly contained on a canvas tarp. If it had landed directly on the carpet, I might have done something sooner. But, well, I was being a dork and letting it sit there.

For a week. Or two.

I got around to cleaning it up this morning. As I had predicted, most of the compost was contained on the tarp and all I had to do was wrap it up and lift it out carefully. The vacuum took care of the stray spills. But! And this is a big but. The compost had been a little moist. Dampness had soaked through the canvas into the carpet where I could now see several wheat or oat seeds (from the straw I sometimes haul back there) had sprouted and taken root...into the carpet.

Ack! Agape and ashamed, I weeded my car floor.

Will I be more responsible next time and clean up my embarrassing, incompetence-generated messes sooner? One would hope. Time will tell.

Robert and James in our "Climbing Bush" this week.