Mens demens in domu puro

Who would have thought that years of Latin would come down to the ability to correctly identify and decline the ablative case so as to fudge a saying?

In any case, I cleaned house. I CLEANED house, as in I spent the long weekend last weekend gathering like things together and putting them in proper containers, moving books around, cleaning duvet covers, and deciding which clothes to pass onto the box at the bottom of the street.

This always makes me a bit nuts. My first question is inevitably, where did this stuff come from? There's nothing like hard evidence which demonstrates that you do lots of things you don't remember to make you insane. And yet, I like having a house with clear surfaces and organized shelves and boxes. So away I blithely go.

There is the growing collection of L.M. Montgomery books. In and of themselves they are perfectly innocent, even wholesome. They are, gradually, becoming the collection my mother said I had to leave in her attic for her grandchildren. Finding them bothers me. I don't want to be back in the time when these books were important; if I were buying them I would go and buy a new set with different covers. Most importantly though, where did they come from? I don't remember buying them. I presume they're not stolen: they have used-bookstore prices in them and they smell used-bookstory. But they are so thoroughly not mine.

Then there are half - quarter - 1/16th started projects all over. A painting. A story. A colouring book. A pillow. Knitting. Letters. Herb gardens. Lego. I suppose a lot of this detrius is normal, but I find it hard to sort out what is and what isn't when I don't - or scarcely - remember starting it, and definitely can't recall the appeal.

All of these things bring mess which I don't remember creating. So a true clean up means putting everything back where I think it should go, trying to get all the pens in one place, although experience shows people have 'theirs' which they move around at random. I have tried giving people - named or not - boxes, shelves, or drawers for their things but they refuse to do that. Then someone might know they cared about that thing. Far safer to leave it lying on a mantlepiece somewhere.

Yes, there are Carl's things too, but they are clearly his for the most part. I am more grudging about them than I should be though, because of the context. If I'm so insane that I can't keep my stuff clean couldn't he, the same one, at least put his things away? But this is unfair. And this weekend - hurrah - I controlled the feminine fit urge and let him play Final Fantasy VIII relatively undisturbed, so long as he moved for me to pull out a hat box now and then for me to put things in.

I feel like a house mother, but I don't know who lives in the dorm or how to get them to pitch in now and then.

It's more than just that, though, it's this odd realization that the day does have 24 hours. The $40 in my wallet which became $20 actually purchased something, as opposed to just regularly disappearing. Regular people might actually have time to do things after work, instead of it sort of clouding over into something someone else wants to do all the time. Everyone talks about all the clothes in their closet but do they really remember *picking* and *buying* most of them?

I thought for as far back as I can remember, which isn't that far, that everyone in the world's possessions increased without them knowing, that when people talked about money disappearing they meant it, and that everyone put off housekeeping for the same reason I do - I don't want to have to puzzle over who else made the mess.