Because I’m a professional practitioner of the pedagogical arts (known in some parts as fancy book learnin’), I’m privileged to enjoy a Spring Break holiday that usually falls during the same week my semi-grown daughters are also out of school.
Back in the good old days when the girls still spoke to me with actual words, we would spend our Spring Breaks together – playing at the park, riding bikes, or sharing the trauma of a Disney character’s parental death scene.
This year, instead of bonding with me and giggling about my excessive ear hair, all three daughters struck out on their own to sigh dramatically and roll their eyes elsewhere.
My eldest and most expensive daughter took a trip with a friend and several of my credit cards to enjoy the urban vibrancy of Las Vegas. My middle daughter and her sorority sisters soaked up the sun and repelled the advances of countless pec-flexing goobers on the sugar-white sands of Orange Beach, Alabama. My youngest and quietest daughter communed with nature, her best friend, and a jumbo bag of snack cheese on an all-day picnic. I took the family doglets out to potty several times.
Amid these canine assaults on my lawn, I took the opportunity of a daughterless house to do some decluttering. Yes, we are those people who keep things that we might (but probably won’t) need some time in the next fifty years – because who knows when that free miniature tube of toothpaste I got from the dentist in 1997 might come in handy (along with the other 34 tubes in the same drawer).
I’m sad to say that after an entire week of decluttering, I only made it through our laundry room. The following is a catalog of the clutter I decluttered in there.
Copyright 2024 Jase Graves distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.