Housecleaning

We have a cleaning woman who is an excellent aide for our cluttered, dusty, confused household.  My husband is compulsively neat but hides things away for sakekeeping which he then cannot find and lets things rot in the refrigerator rather than discard them.  I am someone who leaves everything in piles where I can remember where everything is rather than putting items away into drawers and cupboards and desk files where they become lost to all eternity.  I just found the swim suit and goggles I took to Greece last month after a desperate search of a week after I finally had the inspiration to go to the trunk storage and look through the exterior zipped pockets of the piece I had traveled with and there was the stuff.  And it had been smart thinking that put them there!  I knew that I was taking a trip at Thanksgiving that involved a stay where there would be a swimming pool!  Today the cleaning woman, a former Marine I might add, comes to clean, and as is the case over the years we have spent hours in a frenzy of "pre-cleaning."  That is the true virtue of having a cleaning woman: become reacquainted with all the bits and pieces of your life that have to be stored away so as to make counters available for cleaning, floor surfaces ready for vacuuming.  I discover so much of my life every other week this way.  It is also true that I am inclined to squirrel everything away in locations that are often completely counter intuitive and so it might take me weeks to rediscover them.  But no doubt about it cleaning day is a vast reorganization that otherwise would never happen, and so, I suppose, that is a Good Thing.