I'm just a few days away from leaving Maryland now, after some slight delay due to having far more stuff to deal with than I had realized was tucked into the various nooks and crannies of this house. I entirely forgot the closets, for example, until one day last week when I went to get something from the pantry. Standing in front of the pantry with my arm outstretched to pick up the object I'd come for, it suddenly dawned on me that the house is FULL of closets like this, and if there's one thing we all know about closets, it's that they hold the debris of our lives, catching the clutter swept off tables and floors just prior to company's arrival..... So I am decluttering, one closet after another, sending some things up to storage in the book barn, some to the garage I just finished cleaning yesterday, some to trash, and some to the thrift stores and selected friends. It would be so much easier to just unload everything into the book barn and re-christen the barn something befitting the mess, but I figure I'll sleep better on the road knowing that awaiting my eventual return home will be a smaller stock of possessions. Sorta like cleaning the kitchen and washing all the dishes just before going away for the weekend, taking pleasure in that when you return home tired and weary, there will not be a messy, smelly kitchen awaiting.

I was to leave after Thanksgiving from my parents place, but delayed the trip by a week to Dec. 6th to deal with these closets and do some minor repairs. I will have to delay until around Dec. 10th, though, because true to form, I realized this morning that I had not yet touched the basement! That's the worse 'closet' of all, having not been cleaned up since I bought this house almost 5 years ago.