One...At a Time.

My house was a wreck! For several weeks my two young grandchildren had been at my home more than they had been at their own. On the days when they had not been there, I was working twelve hour days, an hour away from home. So, I had been too busy to notice that my house was a wreck. But on Saturday, I had a free morning. There was no place I HAD to be and no grandkiddies that needed tending to. As I looked around with an unoccupied eye, I could clearly see “the wreck.”

I went into the kitchen to put turn on the coffee pot and there was a sink full of rinsed, but unwashed dishes and something sticky spilled on the floor. In the living room there was a make-shift bed made up from every available blanket in the house where my grandson had slept a couple of nights before. All twenty-two of Alexander’s “Thomas the Tank Engine” Videos appeared to be scattered, unrewound under the TV cabinet and their empty cases were strewn all over the room.

As I walked across the dining room, I stepped on one of Elizabeth’s blankets. It crunched! I picked it up. She had apparently dumped an entire bowl of goldfish crackers out and tossed a blanket over them. “Are one-year-old children truly capable of making booby-traps for unsuspecting grandmas to fall into?” I asked myself. Her older brother had dumped what appeared to be an entire box of Cheerios onto his wooden railway track to represent an avalanche. AVALANCHE is Right!! There were Cheerios and Goldfish Crackers everywhere!

There were more books on the floor in front of the bookcase than in it. The six empty toy bins testified to the fact that their usual occupants were lying all over the house like so many uninvited cousins form Milwalkee who won’t go home. The balcony was strewn with empty iced tea cans and water bottles that had to be bagged up for recycling.

The dining table was covered with a various sundry collection of stuff like unopened mail, homework, Goldfish Cracker and Cheerio boxes. “If they are going to DUMP them out…why, oh why can’t they THROW them out?” I sighed. There was also a pile of work papers that got put up there because if I leave them on the computer table and Elizabeth finds a crayon lying around, she will mistake them for stretched canvas and scribble all over them.

The bedroom looked like someone with a dirty laundry gun had emptied a round of ammunition onto the floor on one side of the bed and a shipment from “Stuffed Creatures International” had been dropped on the other side. My Journals, which had been neatly stacked on a shelf, had apparently been attacked by a “toddler tornado” because they were untidily spread around underneath my desk. And the bathroom…well, we won’t even GO THERE!!

I poured a cup of coffee, sat down at my cluttered desk, shook my head, and said to myself, “It’s all just too much, even if I spend ALL day cleaning up, I probably won’t get it done and it’s just going to get messed up again tonight when they come back over, anyway. Maybe I’ll just pretend that the maid is coming in next week and ignore the whole darn mess.”

I started to get up and knocked a notebook off the desk with my elbow. As I bent over to pick it up, a quotation I had jotted down on the opened page caught my eye. “Every journey is accomplished ONE step at a time. Don’t stop now.” Whoa! I sat back down and scanned the rest of the page.

The quote was part of a lesson I was preparing for an upcoming Middle School Youth Class that I was teaching. I was planning to stress the importance of some note-worthy one person contributions to society in hopes of showing them how significant they are as individuals.

After the quote, I had written: “Mountains are climbed one foot at a time. Marathons are run one kilometer at a time. Symphonies are composed one note at a time. Novels are written one word at a time. Graduation happens on class at a time. Skyscrapers are built one floor at a time. Wars are won one battle at a time.” "And"...I sighed, “Houses are cleaned…”

I set the notebook down and walked into the kitchen with my now empty coffee mug. I opened the dishwasher and started loading it, one plate at a time. Pretty soon the sink was empty and the dishwasher was humming away.

I decided to tackle the videos next. After sitting for what seemed like forever on the floor in front of the TV rewinding, resleeving, and reshelving Thomas and his friends the overwhelming feeling of not being able to get it all done began to fade. As I started tossing hot wheel cars, action figures, and musical toddler gadgets (Why do all their toys make NOISE?) into their respective now-not-so-empty bins, I began to realize that I actually might be able to make a major dent in the mess.

So, maybe I wouldn’t get it ALL done in ONE morning, but I could sure get some of it finished if I just did what I could. Winston Churchill once said, “Wars are not won by evacuations.”

“And”, I mused, “Houses are not put in order by running off to the mall.”