Ducks in a Row?

(c) 2013 Trina Lambert

Almost a decade ago our newly-relocated washer connections started spewing water all over the basement floor—sounds I heard from upstairs. After running down the stairs, I spied my then-twelve-year-old son staring intently at the game on his computer screen. Our conversation went something like this:

“Jackson, do you hear the water?”

“What water?”

“Can you grab me some towels immediately?”

“What towels?”

“The ones in the linen closet.”

“What linen closet?”

I finally got him to follow me to the linen closet (the one in the close-by hallway space between his and his sister’s bedrooms) and very soon we were sopping up the mess on the floor together with the aforementioned towels.

We live in a 1940s house where storage space is at a premium. Our house didn’t come with amenities such as coat closets or linen closets—where we can, we have added storage places. Sometimes, however, we can’t really change a space so we add organizers. The only linen closet is still in the basement—even the bath towels for the upstairs bathroom remain there because there is no room for them anywhere else.

And while keeping bath towels so far away isn’t so inconvenient, I found it too hard to switch out the smaller hand towels and washcloths as often as needed without keeping them upstairs where they were used. For years I kept the built-in bathroom cabinet overflowing with all the towels and products that could not fit on the small counter. Almost every time I opened the cupboard, towels and all sorts of items would burst out since the organizing containers inside could only contain so much stuff.

When you’re as naturally disorganized as I am, you have to devise organizing systems that give you some chance of success. I’m definitely one of those “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” people so there were many good reasons for moving some of that stuff out into the open—which I finally got to do about six months ago when my daughter moved from one living space to another and no longer had such a tiny bathroom space herself.

That’s when I claimed her over-the-commode (doesn’t that sound fancy?) organizer and went searching for containers that could remain in the open, but still keep me organized. No more toilet paper, bath linens, bottles, and makeup either spilling out of the cabinet or remaining on the countertop—well, on many days, anyway.

Last night I removed one dirty hand towel and ran to put it in the washer before setting out the clean towels. In the meanwhile my husband grabbed some other towel (really, more a rag than anything I would use in the bathroom) to use instead. Now this part of the story is just a matter of two different people seeing matters in a different way, but what follows is similar to the story of my son and the linen closet.

Me: “Oh, the spare hand towel is in the basket in the bathroom.”

Husband: “What basket?”

So today I sent him a picture of the basket—now full since I’d put away the clean towels.

“Where is that?”

“In our bathroom.”

“I thought it was somewhere else. I’ve never seen that.”

“We got it in August after we moved the girls. It’s on the shelf next to the Kleenex container.”

“What Kleenex container?”

Then I sent him a picture of the whole arrangement and he still professed amazement and shock.

This goes on for quite awhile until he then says, “You do know I am pulling your leg, don’t you?”

What he does and does not know about this arrangement apparently will remain a mystery to me, but I’m pretty sure he really did not notice the original basket. And maybe it never occurred to him that things weren’t falling out of the cabinet at the same rate as they have since, well, forever in this house-of-little-storage.

You may be asking yourself, what’s the point of this post? There are few.

First of all, don’t assume someone else “sees”—or “hears” in the case of my son—what you do. Sometimes it doesn’t matter and sometimes it does, but awareness that you don’t always know how something appears from another’s shoes is big. Next, what I might be good at doing and what you might be good at doing are not always the same. Also, you may not even care about something that matters to me and vice versa. Finally, those of us who enjoy applying process improvements in order to make some aspects of life easier aren’t always going to receive the respect and appreciation we expect.

What I think of as having my ducks in a row might lead to no more than being asked, “What ducks?” Here I go—just me and my towel stories—trying to demonstrate that one man’s or woman’s simple is often another’s, “Huh?”