I’ve discovered that I am suffering from an inability to get rid of things

FROM the outset, the man in my life knew he was marrying the opposite of a domestic goddess. I told him, straight up, that I was a slob.

My mother told him he would have to climb over piles of discarded clothes, books and sweet wrappers in order to get into bed. He thought it was amusing exaggeration.

When he found out that it was no word of a lie, he coped using a variation of the way Treasa Drea coped when she had to share a desk with me in school. She got an extra big ruler and pushed all my encroaching stuff back over to my side of the desk with it. Several times a day, without rancour.