“A place for everything, and everything in its place.” That old saying and rule of thumb makes great sense to me, and has always been my go-to approach for how I keep my stuff. I’m pretty ruthless about it.
Now, do I always implement this perfectly without fail? Noooo ….. Such as the sinking feeling I get when I’m walking to the little bucket in the garage where the scissors I use for trimming plants (“chopping and dropping” prolific vegetation, trimming back the prolific, fast-growing coastal dune grasses to use them as mulch to nourish my veggies and fruit trees – it struck me that I am a hay farmer! and love that these beautiful grasses grow back almost overnight) — anyway, when I’m walking to the garage to the designated spot to get those scissors and I start to get a sinking feeling because I know in the back of my mind that I’ve not followed my protocol of putting the scissors back in their spot, and they are now somewhere they don’t belong, and I know not where …
So no, I do not always implement my own preferred approach without fail. However, it works so well that I am pretty good about sticking to it.
This morning, I thought of a new twist on “a place for everything.” How about two places for my scissors. One in their main spot in the bucket in the garage, and one at the other end of the house, on the windowsill inside the front door. This little entryway room, which I call the “porch-ette,” is a place where I spend a lot of time. Being on the south side of the house, it’s where I gravitate in wintertime. And, a lot of the plants that I use scissors to trim are located right outside the front door. It’s sometimes handy to have the scissors in here rather than in the garage, so I can grab them at a moment’s notice and just walk out the front door and do some trimming.
Then I get the best of both worlds: I don’t have to walk to the other end of the house every time I need the scissors, yet the scissors can always be found in one of two predictable spots.
I just started this experiment this morning. We’ll see how it goes! “Two places for everything, and everything in one of two places.”
Note that I didn’t say “everything in two places.” That would be in the realm of science fiction or quantum physics or something, which is beyond the scope of this blog. 😉