Peace by Piece

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When I was a little girl, I watched the movie Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan and started thinking about the wild world of ... Going to Summer Sleepaway Camp. While going to camp sounded like a ton of fun, the piece that stuck out to me far beyond anything else was... packing a suitcase. Packing a suitcase had this romanticism that thrilled me in a way I can barely describe.

I found a camp an hour away, Camp Wannakumbac, and begged my parents to let me go. Once I registered for the camp, they mailed me a packing supply list. When my eyes pored over that list, fireworks went off.

It was like being challenged to the single greatest scavenger hunt ever known to man. 5 t-shirts, 7 pairs of underwear, a sleeping bag, a flashlight. I was being called to find these items and then arrange and organize them in an intelligible way into a suitcase? How could any task be more noble or exciting? So off to work I went, going around my house and finding all the items, organizing them piece by piece into the suitcase. Oh such pleasure! Oh such joy!

It would be another 20 years until I realized I had OCD. 

Now, as an adult I have realized my superpower and have started to do the things that bring me and my OCD great joy. I spent an entire year using the Marie Kondo organizing method (from her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) to go through the house my husband and I had built. Item by item, piece by piece. I pulled every book in the house out from every room in the house, put them all on the living room floor and sorted them one by one. I took every pen, pencil, pencil crayon and marker from every room in the house and sorted them, then assigned them each back to containers and jars around the house. At one point we went through Anthony's 16 filing cabinet drawers from his chiropractic business, spending days handling every single solitary piece of paper. We had two paper shredders going at once, breaking one of them somewhere in the process. 

The final category of our year of organization was sentimental items. It was an emotional day going through old cards, letters & photos from my husband’s late wife, and making each of our 3 kids a pile of their mom's sacred items. 

Now when I walk through my house I have an exact inventory of every item in my house and where it lives. This is a satisfaction that is beyond compare. 

I go through life with joyful fervor finding my new joy, my new project, my new obsession. 

I love throwing Victorian-style picnics using my wicker picnic basket, fine china and crystal glassware. Taking it out under a big oak tree in the most beautiful town-square in Historic Savannah, Georgia. 

I love throwing parties where I get to express my love and caring for people as their host; every single detail thought of, with lavish food, great music, and sometimes, dancing. A beautiful sentiment from Gary Douglas: 

“You can have a mansion in the smallest of houses by having that which others do not have.”

And while I don't have a mansion, I use my OCD capacity to make every part of my life better and more beautiful by doing unusual and eccentric things that are true to who I am. 

How can you use your capacities to make your life a more wonderful place?