cleaning out ........

ok, so after a leisurely beginning to my saturday...coffee on the deck with the newspaper and the mist rising off of the creek.....it was time to get to the tasks at hand.....the place to start was the front room......what some could call a parlor/dining room combo.....as opposed to the back room which is a family room/dining room combo.....we never use these descriptives......the house simply flows from the front room to the kitchen to the back room.....but i digress.......every scrap of paper that touched my middle child's hand in the past year is piled in the informal newspaper recycling shelf......piled in front of it, actually....we are talking poundage of paper.......bits of the microeconomics self-study.......plot notecards from madame bovary........catalogs from colleges that were considered.........envelopes from graduation cards......the cardboard backings to tablets that had no paper......it took 2 laundry baskets to haul the stuff to the garage.......and now i can turn my attention to the crab grass...which has taken over the planting beds, the brick walk, and what is left of the lawn.......curious how crab grass can withstand drought conditions that kill everything else.......i am sorely tempted to drag out the crab grass killer spray...but such chemicals are so damaging to the desirable plants....so it will be with physical labor that the yard is cleaned up.........all this bother could ve avoided if i were to take up the bricks, lay down a mesh liner topped with fresh sand, replace the bricks, and remortar the margins.......yep...that is all it would take to keep crab grass from rooting between the bricks...eventually i will get around to the longterm solution......and crab grass could also be kept at bay if i were to do a little yard work every day.....20 minutes of weeding invested daily could have kept most of this crop from getting out of hand......which brings me back to the business of cleaning out clutter.....throwing things away as they come in is so much easier than having to haul it out after it has reached critical mass......ideally, the samesaid offspring will avoid collecting every paper that touches his hands until it is time to move out next spring......