New year, clean slate for at least 3 months
‘Because I Said So’ column for The Commercial Appeal
Jan. 3, 2013
New year, clean slate for at least 3 months
A brand new year unwrapped, all shiny and sparkling. The packaging is still lying there on the floor, underfoot, where it will probably remain for another week or so. For even longer than that we’ll be writing the last year on our checks if we still do that sort of thing. In this day and age, though, the equivalent might be that your debit card’s expiration date is one notch higher on the online drop-down menu.
It’s still early enough in 2013 that we’re looking back to the past year, collecting its stories together and placing that volume on the shelf next to previous years to see how it holds up in size and weight within the timeline of our lives.
My kids keep their volumes spread out on their bedroom floors to be lost and stepped on, the pages dog-eared and the covers hanging by a thread or lost altogether. They’re there among Christmas presents, birthday gifts, school projects, summertime souvenirs and Halloween (perhaps Easter?) candy. The end of the year is a time of cleansing, of purging, and we take full advantage of it to get into our kids’ rooms and make them, once again, habitable.
This isn’t the only cleaning of the year, mind you. There is spring cleaning and fall cleaning, the massive cleanout at the beginning of the school year and, if there is any focus left in their eyes, at the end of that year.
But last weekend we tackled the task using the new year metaphor of a clean slate. And then we explained to them what a slate is. And then, low and behold, we found an actual slate in the substrata of toys and half-filled composition books.
Cleaning out my kids’ rooms becomes a game of logic, of moving this pile over here so I can get to that pile there; make room for these in that corner and it frees up floor space here for whatever that thing is. It also becomes a time of togetherness; we have to tether ourselves to each other like climbers on Everest in case one gets lost. Memories are scattershot, swept up from under the bed, and past holidays and sleepovers come rushing back to the forefront of our minds.
Being a captive audience — a willing audience, of course, since the kids aren’t literally held captive to clean their rooms; that would be wrong — we take the opportunity to fill that newly clean slate with fresh threats as well: “You will pick up your room every …”, “If your room gets like this again …”, ” … living like pigs.”
I suspect we’ll find that slate in the spring, the warnings partially erased and all but forgotten.
Each new year is like being given a gift of renewal every 365 days. Unwrap it slowly and linger over what might be inside, share it with your family, and, by all means, put that packaging in the garbage sometime before April.
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