On Saturday morning Dave was getting ready to head off to the golf course. He was looking for a few special golf tees he has been using lately. I do have a drawer in our bedroom reserved exclusively for golf paraphernalia I find around the house. If Dave is missing a golf ball, tee, glove, ball marker, club headcover, water bottle, golf towel, or old scorecard he knows I’ve probably picked it up from wherever he plunked it down in the condo and put it in that drawer reserved for his golfing stuff.
During the pandemic, partly because we have had no company, I admit I have become very lax about tidying up our condo. On Friday however, I was fed up with the state of our home and whirled through it putting away lots of stuff including Dave’s golf tees which I tossed in the golf drawer in our bedroom. During the pandemic, Dave has become accustomed to me leaving things wherever he drops them. So on Saturday, he couldn’t figure out why his golf tees weren’t beside the sink in the bathroom where he had left them when he emptied his pockets after his previous golf game. “Where are my golf tees?” he fumed. “I left them in the bathroom.”
His consternation made me realize there are lots of little collections of his scattered about our living space that would have irritated me in the past and I would have itched to organize and clean up and put away. Now I just let things accumulate.
Case in point his hand sanitizer collection nestled in amongst a display of treasures from our time living in Asia. Dave bought hand sanitizer from Farmery Brewery near the beginning of COVID-19 because it was unavailable in stores. The sanitizer came in beer cans and needed to be transferred to other kinds of containers. He scoured the house for various suitable bottles, bought funnels to help him fill them up and then covered the containers with black duct tape because he’d heard exposure to light decreased the sanitizer’s effectiveness.
Normally I would consider a display such as this an eyesore and would have whisked all these lovely containers into a cupboard. But now I’ve just let it be.
We must own more than a hundred CDS and one of Dave’s pandemic projects has been trying to listen to them all. On his regular trips to Steinbach to golf, he will take a stack out to the car to listen to as he drives. He brings them back in after each trip and piles them in various places around the condo. Normally I would return the CDs scattered around the condo to the drawer in our living room shelving unit I have designated for them, but because I’m pretty sure all of Dave’s CD piles represent some sort of organized system in his mind I have just left the stacks alone.
I don’t know if I will be able to restrain my itchy tidying up fingers from putting away Dave’s various COVID collections once we can have visitors in our home again, but I am thinking one of the reasons we have been getting along so well during our time of relative isolation is because I haven’t been cleaning up as much and he can create collections of stuff wherever he wants to. Maybe one of the lessons I’m learning during COVID-19 is that a happy marriage partner is more important than a tidy house.
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