Meg Evans

My husband and I rowed our double scull in a regatta over the weekend. This is only our fourth season since we learned to row, and we still have plenty of room for improvement. But, we were happy to come home with bronze medals from our race.

It’s always fun to go to the regattas with our friends from the rowing club, and we like comparing how we do each year and seeing how we’re getting better. Whether or not we notice much change from one day to the next, regular practice always leads to improvement as time goes by. And of course, the most important thing is simply being open to new adventures!

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!

Yesterday, while I was sitting around the house enjoying a lazy Saturday morning, I started to wonder what I could write about for my Good Things post this week. I looked around, but didn’t immediately spot anything new and fresh. Surely there had to be something. After all, the whole point of writing this series was to appreciate how often good stuff shows up.

And then I realized that I was wearing it! Not long ago, my husband had bought me a pretty new sleeveless dress for the warm weather. It’s very comfortable, and that’s what I put on when I got dressed on Saturday.

This just goes to show—there’s always something to be happy about because life is full of abundance, and it’s likely to be right on top of us even when we don’t notice it!

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!

Last spring I wanted to plant lantana next to my mailbox. I’ve always liked the flame-colored ones, in particular. But when I looked at garden stores, I didn’t see any lantana and ended up planting mandevilla instead, as shown in this post.

The mandevilla was pretty, and it reminded me to keep an open mind to finding beautiful things everywhere. This year I walked into the garden store just thinking I’d browse for a little while and find something I liked, rather than having a particular kind of flower in mind for the mailbox area. And, you guessed it, they had plenty of lantana on display, in my favorite colors too.
 

Sometimes, what we’re looking for is more likely to show up when we’re not looking for it!

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!

Last week I wrote a Good Things post about replacing old garage shelves. They looked much better, and we had more space for everything that we moved there. The only problem was that one of the items moved was a decrepit, grimy plastic basket where I kept small gardening things such as a spade and gloves. I hadn’t yet gotten around to buying new gardening gloves for this season, either.

So this week I made a point of getting out to the store to buy new gloves in a cheerful pink color for spring, along with a somewhat bigger plastic basket, which fits nicely on the shelf in place of the old basket and keeps everything a lot tidier.
 

Much improved—now everything in that area of the garage is looking fresh and new! We also brought a medium-sized plastic garbage can, which hadn’t been used in years and was still in good condition, up from the basement to replace an icky old one in the garage. Always best to be thorough when doing a makeover, whatever its subject may happen to be!

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!

My past blog entries about clutter never featured a photo of the old shelves in the garage, but not because it wasn’t deserved. The shelves, left behind by the previous owners when my family moved into our starter house in 1993, probably had been there for many years already. When we bought our current house, we moved the shelves without thinking much about it. Just one more thing to replace eventually.

After that, we didn’t think much about the old shelves, except that sometimes when we walked past them we noticed the obvious fact that they had seen better days. But they weren’t falling down yet, so there was always something else that got our attention instead.

On Monday afternoon, when it was so cold and rainy that we didn’t feel like going anywhere, my husband decided that it would be a good time to put together some new shelves. Not only are they sturdier than the old creaky ones, they’re also larger and hold a lot more stuff, letting us organize things in the garage much better. There was so much difference, it left us saying “Wow!”
 

And garbage pickup was the next morning, which was good because there definitely wasn’t anything worth salvaging in the old shelves! When we took them apart, one of the screws wouldn’t turn because of all the rust, and just had to be broken loose with a kick.

Sometimes a little more structure goes a long way—not only as to the shelves, but also making sure to replace old worn-out stuff when it needs to be done!

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!

One of my Clutter Comedy posts featured the shower caddy with a bottle of men’s shampoo, which become completely useless several years ago when my husband decided to shave his head. All that time, I had been putting my shampoo and conditioner next to it without paying attention. I tried a few different kinds, but nothing seemed to be quite right for my hair, and I was getting frustrated. On my bad hair days, it has an unfortunate tendency to stick out on the sides and make “wings” around my ears. Last week I bought this “calming” shampoo and conditioner by Nature’s Gate:
 

My husband thought that “calming” was a funny thing to call shampoo and conditioner, but they really did help to settle my hair into nice calm waves, rather than wildly sticking out all over. And they are sulfate-free and made with healthy herbs, so they’re better for my scalp than the other stuff I had been using. So, I give them a big yay. And, if the shower caddy hadn’t been decluttered last year, it’s likely I would not have found them. I wouldn’t have been as adventurous in trying new hair products because clutter subconsciously makes people expect that things won’t change.

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!

My daughter drove down from Cleveland with her dog on Friday night and spent the weekend here. We enjoyed her visit and were glad she took the time out of a busy schedule to come and see us. All too soon, she packed up her car to leave this morning. Here’s a photo of the dog eating breakfast just before getting on the road, already wearing the little harness that attaches to the doggie car seat.
 

At first I wasn’t sure if I should write about a family visit in a Good Things post, as it was not unexpected. Also, how did it fit into the theme of good stuff replacing clutter and stagnation? Although there was indeed some physical clutter when dog and daughter were living here, my husband often reminded me (when I stepped on a chew toy or something and got cranky about it) that I should appreciate the moment because they would be gone soon enough, and all we’d have would be occasional visits.

So, I would say that what I cleared away to make space for good family visits was not the physical clutter. Rather, it was the bad habit of letting myself get annoyed about stuff that really didn’t matter. That’s all too easy to do; and in truth, it is just mental garbage taking up space where good things could go instead!

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!

One of my kitchen cabinets always seemed like it filled up with new freebie water bottles faster than I got rid of old ones—there’s a photo in this post. Recently my husband went through them again and pitched most of the water bottles at the back of the cabinet. He pointed out that they hadn’t gotten any use at all since our daughter moved to Cleveland, and she hadn’t used them much anyway.

Then he bought some Polar Bottles, two of which are shown here:
 

Much better—the Polar Bottles are very well insulated. When we put ice water in them before we go rowing, the ice melts so slowly that there is still some ice left when we get home, even on a warm and sunny afternoon. Even though water bottles are just everyday consumer items and not expensive, they’re a great reminder that the modern world is full of “cool” new stuff to appreciate!

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!

I started writing weekly Good Things posts last month so that I would notice and appreciate what shows up when clutter goes out. Today’s post is not about material things, however, but about time. Clutter isn’t just physical—when people clutter up their schedules with lots of stuff to do, they often forget that time is an abundant resource.

I have to confess that happened to me a few years ago. When my daughter was playing soccer in college, I felt like I had to save so much time for traveling to soccer matches, I often ended up not taking any vacation time for the entire first half of the year. That left me with the same feeling as physical clutter—bogged down, tired, and overwhelmed.

My daughter graduated two years ago, but I didn’t fully get that time-hoarding mindset out of my head until last week, when my husband said, “The weather on Friday should be warm and sunny—let’s plan to take the afternoon off from work and go down to the river and row.”

Although we’re going into our fourth season as members of our local rowing club, and we enjoy it a lot, we had never before spontaneously taken time off from work just to spend the afternoon rowing. Honestly, it took me a moment just to get the idea through my head that, yes, just doing something fun because I feel like doing it is a perfectly reasonable use of vacation time!

Here’s a photo at the dock early Friday afternoon, just before we got into the boat:
 

Performance sculls are long and very narrow, so I couldn’t take a picture from close enough to show much detail. Even from where I was standing, the photo doesn’t show the ends of the boat, and it’s hard to see a black carbon-fiber scull on dark river water anyway. But, we had fun. This has been a very relaxing weekend—it feels like it’s been going on for a very long time and still isn’t over yet, yay!

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!

Around this time last year, I wanted to buy spring and summer clothes to refresh my closet, which was full of old stuff and felt bogged down in stagnant energy. I couldn’t find anything I liked in the catalogs, though, and never got around to shopping in the stores. So I ended up wearing old things and feeling annoyed about it, as I described here. When I realized that was a big part of the problem, I got rid of the worst offenders, but still didn’t have anything new and fresh to wear.

Later I noticed that although I’d disposed of some clutter, my closet still lacked space to put new clothes. Maybe that was part of the problem, too? I folded up some old sweatshirts (shown in this post) and put them neatly on an upper shelf, out of the way. My closet looked bare for a while; but when the spring catalogs arrived this year, they were full of lovely things I wanted to buy. Here’s a photo of three pretty, colorful blouses I ordered recently, with just a glimpse of the old sweatshirts on the upper shelf.
 

My husband mentioned that the colors and patterns looked kind of retro, like something I might have worn in the early ’80s when we met. I hadn’t really thought about it when I ordered them, but he is right about that. Maybe there’s something else going on here subconsciously, like giving myself permission to go back to a simpler time when life felt more spontaneous and fun?

* Good Things is a weekly series featuring the many unexpected joyful things that show up when clutter and stagnation have been cleared away. It’s meant as a reminder that life is always full of happy little surprises, when there’s enough space for them!