What’s falling?… my anger I thought was hung during spring cleaning. Fall equinox¹ is near and I see its time to balance some things out in my emotional closet again.
When I’m battling sleep deprivation (like I’m doing again lately), I don’t realize when I’m packing my bags with crappy emotional souvenirs from my trip through the season and stuffing them into the closets of my consciousness. Eventually they tumble out and pop open. It’s not pretty, as you may have noticed from my recent posts.
I wonder how much things like that might parallel with actual physical experiences.
Yesterday, my Aspie son’s Aspieness spilled out from his room of the house into the other rooms. He is Mr. Neat on feet. I’m not sloppy, but lately I haven’t been keeping up to his standards of organization (line those pencils up and do it in a particular order while you’re at it!). How can a 20 year old understand yet what the consequences of insomnia can do to a person? Maybe he does and that’s why he did what he usually doesn’t do?
Usually, the only thing he insists on being in absolute order every night (outside of his room) is the way the towels are hung in the bathroom and how the stuff on the bathroom shelves are lined up. It wasn’t unusual for him to vacuum the house on occasion when asked, but yesterday he went beyond that.
My leaving all the windows open to let in the wonderful scent of maple leaves starting to dry (oh how I LOVE that!), also let the breeze have its way with the papers laying around the house. I was outside raking leaves and unaware of the leaves of paper falling inside the house.
When I came back indoors, I had to pick up the papers off the floor. With the vacuum cleaner still going (Mr. Neat took an unusual amount of time at it), I was only capable of gathering them together into a pile. To sort them out was not possible in my state of being (the sound of a vacuum cleaner slows down my thought processing; to a crawl, when over-tired³).
Is that what triggered my son into tackling the bookshelf in our hallway (normally he leaves that one alone)? That shelf accumulates a lot of notes, being that it’s the station for our phones.² Mr. Neatson (I just gave him a new name) INSISTED I sort out the papers he scattered out and decide what to do with them or else he’d throw them all into the garbage. Being that I knew he was really helping me (oooh… the urge to procrastinate and wait for a ‘better’ time!), I discovered a compromise that pleased everyone.
Waking up this morning and seeing the outcome of yesterday’s household chores seems to match nicely with the upcoming seasonal change outdoors.
¹At 5:18 pm (EST) on 9-22-9.
²Two phones, since it was cheaper to buy another cordless phone instead of a new battery for the original one. The first one disconnects without warning and so does the second one, but the second one does it for unknown reasons (it has a good battery). It’s actually a good system for those of us who tend to lose track of time easily, but sometimes callers end up thinking they’ve been hung up on.
³Running a vacuum cleaner all night would cure my sleepless nights (it’d keep hubby awake all night), but that probably would get expensive after awhile. Fans help, but they’re nothing like the hum of a vintage Electrolux on in another room!
