On my wrist is a bright yellow rubber bracelet with LIVESTRONG imprinted on it.  I plucked it from a small wicker basket on a table next to a guest book at a memorial service where one of the loved ones spoke about the task of sorting through everything left behind -- the clothes, the music, the souvenirs, the tchochke, the scraps of paper -- and of how each item had meant something to the person who kept and carried them. The meaning they had held was a mystery, forever emptied out of them, and yet the temptation to hold those items, like still fragments of that lost friend, was strong. He spoke of how how he was inspired to value love and live lighter.

Thousands of miles from where I sit now with the bracelet on my wrist, there is a white shingled house with a bedroom that was once mine and remains a shrine to my childhood self. In the bedroom sits a sturdy set of Ethan Allen bookcases painted a soft sunshine yellow, because that was my favorite color when I was three.  The top of the bookcases are open shelves; the bottom, cabinets with slatted doors.  When I was a preschooler, my family moved to a new city, and one day, while my mother was unpacking boxes, I crawled into the bottom of the one of these bookcases, shut the doors, and fell asleep.  My mother spent what must have seemed to her to be frantic hours searching our new home before finding me there, while I have no memory of it at all.

Now too small a space to hold all of me, the cabinets hold (among other things) an old cardboard shoebox filled with odd scraps that formed the butt-ends of my days and ways: a chewed up old pencil, a single crumpled page from a Far Side daily calendar, a bent nail, a quarter and numerous other things I've forgotten. There is also a sheet of notebook paper in the box that explains what each item is and why it is important to me.

Each item was carefully placed in the box and labeled after I spent a summer helping my mother clear out her parents' house. There were shelves and closets full of things. There was an attic and a basement crammed with dusty boxes.  There was furniture and photographs. There were old letters and old bank statements and old receipts and piles of Playboy magazine. There was a child's baseball uniform for a grown man already in his grave, old 78 records with nothing to play them on, a doll dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and a round flowered tin full of tobacco. What ought we to keep? What did it all mean: to them or to us or to anyone?

But far from being inspired to live lighter at the time, I was inspired to document, to label a box of detritus so that someone sifting through it could see the meaning in a bent nail and not wonder at it with a sigh. But as I think of that box, of that crumpled paper and bent nail and all the other things I can't recall, I don't remember the meaning they had myself. And that sheet of notebook paper? It's a letter to me. I'm the beneficiary and the executor of my own estate. And I think, the next time I visit that cardboard box, it may be time to honor myself and let go: to learn that lesson of loving strong and living light.  Well, except that chewed up pencil.  I might not be quite ready to part with that yet.

I used to love to watch The Odd Couple on TV growing up. I always hated Felix, so prissy and uptight, but I loved Oscar, unable to find his bed under piles of clothes and bits of old sandwiches. That, I thought, is me. And it's been true.

Mark and I had a friend come to visit once at an especially crazy point in our lives; Mark was finishing school and looking for a job while we simultaneously searched for a new apartment. We came home after an afternoon out apartment hunting to find that our friend (much to both our chagrin and delight) had done the dishes and made dinner. She asked how our day had been and we said it had been largely unsuccessful, as several of the places we saw did not come with dishwashers, and that was one of our primary requirements. Our friend wrinkled her nose and said, "It should be." Our dishes had been on the verge of growing enough life on them to become sentient and walk away.

After that, I did get a bit more fussy about cleaning before we had guests over. And I always inwardly roll my eyes when people who have never seen my house tell me not to fuss about cleaning so much. "People who love you won't mind if the house isn't perfect!" They say that, blissfully unaware that my aspirations have not generally been in the realm of a pearl-clad, white-gloved June Cleaver but more like "no overwhelmingly noxious odors."

Still, far from being ashamed of my slovenly ways, I've always had a deep pride in them. I was tickled that my kids had to learn from a book what an iron looks like and what it does or what a mop is for. "I'm no prissy, uptight Felix Unger," my home says to the world, "I'm casual and lovable Oscar Madison. And I have more time for fun since I'm not fiddling with all that silly cleaning."

Still since I've had kids, I have to admit, overall it's been less fun to be a slob than it used to be. I started worrying about what was around that they might shove in their mouths as babies. I started losing things and spending hours searching for them in piles of junk. I started impaling my feet on toys. And I started cleaning up my act, just a little: trying to have places for things rather than throwing them wherever they might land, doing the dishes at least every other day, occasionally sorting the laundry rather than dumping whites and colors all in together.

Yet I found myself taking offense the other day when I told a friend I needed to cut our chat short so that I could clean up the house in preparation for a guest and she told me not to sweat the cleaning stuff so much. I wanted to scream "I'm a slob! I have dead ants on my kitchen wall that are a year old! I am not some uptight, controlling perfectionist!" And that's when it hit me. This whole slob thing isn't about what I am, it's about manipulating other people's perceptions of me.

Being a slob, like its evil twin of being fastidious, is an extreme. I didn't want to be perceived as one extreme, so I swung to the other. And it's not serving my needs anymore. I don't like not being able to find things. I don't like smelly dishes. I don't like once white shirts that look rumpled and pinkish grey. I don't like looking at dead ants on my wall. But there's one thing I do like about being a slob, one thing that has always served me, the reason I still cling to my squalor: it allows me to say what I'm not. It lets me hold up my moldy dishes as proof that I am not an uptight, controlling, perfectionist codependent.

Guess what? I am an uptight, controlling, perfectionist codependent. And it's time to recognize that and work on balance rather than continue to leave unwanted crumbs on the floor to refute it.

"Here's your purse, Mama."
Her eyes glow with pride to be
handing me my bag.

Wallet, glasses, keys,
pen, old receipts, crumpled bills,
crumbs of ancient snacks.

To her it must seem
like some sacred mystery:
Mama's treasure chest.

Her smile makes me think,
"Why do I carry so much?
What more do I need?"

As of this moment, I have a backlog of 283 messages (and 608 Google Alerts) in my e-mail inbox. (Maybe there's one there from you!) So, I've decided that rather than writing today, I'm going to try to dig through at least some of that virtual clutter.

While you wait for me to finish, you can feast your eyes in envy on the lovely piece of art that will soon be gracing my "home office" (ok, a corner of my bedroom where I have a chair I sit in with my laptop). The multi-talented marta slices up drafts of her novel to create this new kind of art from her words. You can take a look at this and other pieces at Words Are Art.

I had a really wonderful, productive day yesterday. I got the kids fed and clothed and to school on time. While they were in school, I:

• did all the dishes
• washed and dried a load of laundry
• got some good writing work done
• meditated
• ate a healthy lunch
• went through one box of old crap from my closet

After they got home I fed them snacks and a healthy dinner and got them off to bed on time. Then my husband and I watched Lost on DVD (we're all caught up and ready for the new season!) and went to bed (too late).

Yep, all of that sounds great, until I consider that yesterday I did NOT:

• bathe the kids
• comb my daughter's tangly hair
• have anyone do any homework (homework was last done by my daughter before Thanksgiving in November and by my son, um, so far just one night in September)
• cook a meal (I microwaved pre-made foods I purchased. I cook with about the same frequency that I blow dry my hair, and I only do that for weddings.)
• fold or put away the laundry
• clean the cat's litter box (it's been, ahem, a while)
• answer the 233 messages in my inbox

I have proven time and again that I can only achieve about half of the two lists combined in one day, and that's only when I am at my absolute peak of performance, like an Olympic athlete breaking a world record. Unfortunately, what I too often expect myself to do is break world records every day, and more. I consistently want to finish both damn lists each and every day. It doesn't feel like my expectations for myself are unreasonable or the tasks are so unmanageable that completing them all regularly is a superhuman feat, and yet they are.

Now it seems I have another thing to add to the not done list. I did not:

• toss out the mental weight of the Not Done list.

Damn!

Somehow it's never spring that spurs me to great acts of cleaning and home renovation; it's this time of year. December and January seem to be my favorite months for tearing apart the inside of my home. Spring seems to be my favorite time for getting out of it. So, today I was cleaning out my closet: bagging up old clothes to give to charity, figuring out what the heck is in all the boxes I have piled in there and cleaning out the dark corners.

I really don't like this task. It's dirty and dusty and sometimes there are spiders. And it's also triggering. My husband and I are not the most organized people. We generally let piles of stuff accumulate until they are about to topple over, then stick them in boxes and shove them in a closet. Sometimes we shove important papers in there, but it all works out, as other people tend to badger us about the really crucial stuff so that we don't forget. So, every year or so, when the spirit to rid myself of all this clutter possesses me, I shuffle through the boxes of stuff trying to sort out what should stay and what should go.

There are always old receipts, which slow me down because I'm tempted to check them. What is this for? When was it? Who was there? Every old receipt is a quick pinprick; I tense and then breathe, tense and then breathe. I have to remind myself with each piece of paper that it doesn't matter, that whatever has happened, I'm in a different place now. Then there are little scraps of paper with notes and cards and pictures. And there are old computer cords and discs, old toys and old clothes. And each one feels like a trap and a burden: something that could send me reeling to some dusty, dark corner of my own mind, to some memory of my husband's actions in addiction, to some new hurt I wasn't aware of yet.

I'm moving through and cleaning it all out, but it's slow, hard work when each object has so much fear tied to it: fear that drags each little scrap to the ground like a lead weight. But that burden lifts with each breath, with each paper through the shredder, with each old toy or piece of clothing in the charity bag. I'm slowly chasing the spiders out of those dark corners and reclaiming the space.

There have been times I've experienced computer problems when I would spend hours and hours cleaning up this and patching that. And at some point I'd find it was just easier to wipe the hard drive clean and reinstall everything from scratch: crazy bits of old useless extensions and drivers gone, evil spyware gone, internet cookies gone, everything gone in one swift, all encompassing gesture.

As I dig myself out of the wrapping paper and pine needles, as I clean up what looks like an explosion of Christmas dinner from the kitchen stove and counters, as my husband meets with counselors to deal with our debt and I worry that we spent both too much and too little on gifts, I find myself wishing I could obliterate everything and start over, wipe the hard drive of my life and reinstall everything.

I want the debt gone.

I want the house cleaned from top to bottom and every broken thing returned to its original state.

I want everyone healthy.

I want old resentments and hurts gone.

I want every horrible, stupid, insensitive or just plain ignorant thing I've ever done, said or thought forgiven.

I want to forgive everyone for everything.

I want my whole world clean and white and untouched as new fallen snow.

And then I remember George Bailey, at the end of It's a Wonderful Life, kissing the end of the stair post that comes off in his hand. Life is life. It's as it should be. And it's wonderful.