Chores

If you suffer under the misimpression that living tiny eliminates chores, let me educate you.

Yesterday, I did two loads of laundry, took all my throw rugs outside to air, vacuumed the entire house (except lofts; okay, the first floor — about 175 square feet), and completely disassembled my entire daybed in order to change the sheets and rescue my winter blanket from the storage area.

It got interesting at that point — dare I say, even comical.  To retrieve the blanket, I had to remove two body-pillows, two bolsters, three large pillows, two medium pillows, and four small pillows.  Following that, I slid two sewing-machine drawers off of the platform along with the jewelry box which sits on top of them.  I then hoisted the cedar chest which completes the end-cap assemblage until it could be slid around to hold one side of the mattress.  I maneuvered my body under the other side of the mattress, using my head as a sort of tent pole.

With one lily white spastic hand, I inched open the 1/2 sheet of plywood which forms the storage cubby lid.  I forced it perhaps two inches, with the weight of it on the only three fingers of my left hand which have never been broken.  Straining against its pressure, I snaked my right thumb and forefinger under the wood, snatched an edge of the blanket, and began pulling.  At that point, my left hand failed and dropped the lid, but the thickness of the blanket allowed me to continue withdrawing it, inch by inch.  Mind you, I still had the mattress balanced on my head and the cedar chest.

I kept thinking:  I really need to redesign this underbed storage.

When I finally got the blanket out, I reversed the disassembly, first putting clean sheets on the mattress (no easy feat for a crippled girl shorter than the dimensions of the bed platform).  I collapsed onto my dining chair, gazing at the finished product.  The entire affair had taken me ninety minutes.

When my neighbor Laurie stopped by for a visit, I told her the story over glasses of Lodi wine.  We could barely contain our laughter.

I slept well last night, on clean sheets, under my favorite blanket, with the cool air of a Delta autumn night flowing through Angel’s Haven.

It’s the twenty-ninth day of the fifty-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Each time someone suggested a way to make the bed look more like a couch for visitors, I deployed the suggestion. The cedar chest rests on the platform to the right under the window. Still no one uses the daybed as a couch! The back half of the under-bed platform has a lid which is unhinged (like me at times) and heavy. Remind me not to store the blanket there next spring! #mytinylife

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