on rearranging.

School is out for the summer. Summers are shorter now than when I was a child, but still. It’s a big break. And the transition from school schedules to lazy days came out of nowhere.

We celebrated her success with snow cones at the park. She ran from one friend to another, hugging and climbing trees, drawing with sidewalk chalk and generally giggling with a toothless grin.

What a year! She learned to read. (Tell me of greater wonder than watching your child read a story. Please. Try. I dare you. I’ll wait…) She learned her numbers. She made friends. She made many friends. Her kind heart extended out to the other wonderful humans sharing the classroom. After relative isolation as an only child during the pandemic, my heart leapt each day she came home and spoke a new name of a new friend she played with on the playground.

Her last day of kindergarten coincided with the Uvalde massacre. So we celebrated, but the massacre rattled in the back of my head. My restlessness kept me checking my phone. And with each swipe, the death toll rose.

This isn’t a piece about common sense gun laws. Moms Demand Action and Evetytown sums that up better than I. As does every meme the internet has to offer. No one needs to be told that Uvalde could have been my town, my school, my child. We walk around knowing that in the deep pit of our stomachs.

This about how my grief and my fear and my aching heart and sick, sick stomach found me on my knees in her room, rearranging.

It started with the bins. What was at the bottom of that one again? Where are all the school supplies I’d feverishly bought at the top of the pandemic? (Another moment where my fear and the world’s uncertainty joined forces, and I arranged an Amazon shopping cart to revival any homeschool household around.) We can’t use the Montessori beads if we can’t SEE the Montessori beads. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with again. Out of sight out of mind.

I unpack. I reassess. I rearrange. I sort. I organize.

I merge the large collection of stuffies, jamming them into one larger bin, then sort the figurines and detective gear into another.

I ask if she still wants the tea set. It’s barely been used in 3 years.

She does.

She sees the jewelry making kits as I lift them out of another bin. She asks to make a necklace. It’s passed bedtime so I say no.

But the sorting is soothing me. I don’t want to stop. I’d rather let her stay up late than force myself to pause. It’s the outlet I’ve needed all day. More than crying futile tears (although, that too, was needed at one point). Sending the emails to politicians gives me no relief. Giving money gives me no relief. Scrolling social media definitely gives me no relief. I do all those things but they don’t calm me.

Sorting and organizing and decluttering does. It always has. The end result is never been the lure for me. (Despite the payoff… I consolidated the jewelry making kits from 3 boxes into 1. Felt fantastic.). ‘Keeping my hands busy’ has always drawn me in. The action of sorting and separating, organizing and decluttering — do the action, and my mind will follow. Before I know it, my thoughts get swept up in the act. And therein lies the reprieve. Momentary but still — decluttering the space takes my mind off those children and this country and these politicians and the slaughter. The barbarism. Civilized society we are not.

Rearranging is the safest, most innocent distraction I’ve ever known. (And I’ve turned to many, many distractions in my day.) The problems it solves are often proclaimed as life-changing in the current zeitgeist. You can now find your keys! Everything looks serene! You can have a friend over for coffee and catch up IN YOUR CLOSET it’s so pretty to look at now.

And that’s true. And that’s fun. But please -

Never mistake my tidy home for order. I’m clawing for calm in a world that’s anything but.