This is my Grandma Sally’s kitchen table! The one that used to seat a family of 12 in a big brick house in a beautiful neighborhood near 12 Mile and Woodward in the beautiful city of Royal Oak. Just down the street from the Shrine of the Silver Dollar Little Flower. Yes, that’s where Father Coughlin used to preach and that’s where the GG and all his sibs went to grade school and sometimes beyond. A beautiful church that even an old heathen like me appreciates.

Anyway. My Grandma Sally’s table is CLEAR!!! Shout it out loud! I even did a quick swab with Windex wipes although it could use a good deep cleaning. Ignore the junk peeking out from underneath the table. Ignore the junk sneaking in at the edges of the photo. Ignore the haphazardly hung “art” on the dingy dungeon wall. The table is CLEAR!!!

I can’t remember the last time that table didn’t have *something* on it. I do remember a time period when Mouse and Goose [her friend from around two corners] were in a period of occasional loose ends. I can’t remember if they were in middle school or early high school but they could not drive yet and they spent a lot of time on those dreadful winter-time school vacations having back-to-back sleepovers either here or at Goose’s house. You know those vacations. The weather sucks and it gets dark at five o’clock and you are too old for Chuck E. Cheese and your parents are too poor to take the week off and fly to some tropical paradise and you can’t drive yet. You call your sister to ask her to drive you BACON (from about a block away) and then there are the times when you get totally (and understandably) SICK of each other and need to be apart for a while. And that lasts for a few hours and then one of you calls and you end up having yet another sleepover. BAGAWK!

So, what do you do? You watch videos (BAGAWK BAGAWK) until you can’t stand videos any more and then… If your moom has a gazillion tons of fabric in the basement and a sewing machine and an iron and lots of embellishment types of stuff? You go downstairs and create things. And that is a fun, creative thing to do and your moom thinks, “Oh no! my Grandma Sally’s table will never get cleared off again.” But she will also think that she would rather have you and your friend trash her dank, dark, gray, greasy, limpopo “studio” than be hangin’ out at the mall with some cute but stoopid guy testing out those funny cigarettes or whatever. And so she sighs to herself a bit. She loves you and your very good friend and knows that she will have time to clean it up later. 10 years later, maybe.

And yes. 10 years or so later, my Grandma Sally’s table is cleared off. Ignore the junk peeking out… You already read about all the stuff that is *not* cleaned up. This is a small success but it is one more small step toward dumpster avoidance post mortem. I am celebrating.

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