Well, the roof started leaking the day of the heavy rain at the end of January.

If it wasn’t for stepping in the puddle on the bedroom floor, I would not have looked up to see the telltale water marks on the ceiling.

That meant a trip up the stairs to the attic.

However, before being able to do that, I had to remove the bins full of clothes and Christmas decorations that didn’t quite make it all the way up to the attic and were precariously stacked on the steps.

The leaks were easy enough to find as there were three puddles on the attic floor similar to the one on the bedroom floor.

Knowing full well the roofer would not be out to fix the leaks the next day, I mopped up the water, placed newspaper on the floor and then realized I would need to empty the bins to catch water from the next rain.

That led to all of their contents - clothes, decorations and, oh yes, old toys - being dumped onto the bed in another bedroom.

Well, the roofer didn’t come until the end of February, and I now had a mess in both that bedroom and the bedroom with the leaky ceiling.

So, now it was time to fill bags with no-longer-needed clothes, decorations and toys to give to Goodwill.

Clothes and decorations that were not being donated ended up in a third bedroom that - you guessed it - was now a mess.

The bags holding the soon-to-be-donated items ended up in the kitchen at the back door along with stacks of books (I will get to them in a minute) to be loaded into the car.

The books came from shelves in the fourth bedroom that I now had to empty to make room for the Santas, the holiday tchotchkes and the assorted bric-a-brac from the emptied bins.

Now, half the kitchen was full of bags and books, so I decided to clean off the countertops and straighten items in the drawers, which, for some reason, led to removing the Christmas plates from the dining room table and getting the spring-themed plates from the cabinet on the front porch.

The Christmas plates, now on the porch floor, have not yet made it into the cabinet, and the clothes remain on a chair waiting to be placed on hangers in the closet.

The good news, however, is spring doesn’t officially begin for two weeks, March 19, so technically, I am ahead of the game.

Maybe, by the start of summer, everything finally will be where it belongs ... that is after I empty the bins containing the summer clothes.

Deb Palmieri

editor

Parkland Press

Northwestern Press