Pile o'shoes? Well, okay.

I think there will be a moment where young adult children, departing to resume their at-school lives, realize that it would be thoughtful to leave their rooms tidy. Maybe pick up the towels and other flotsam off the bathroom floor. Maybe toss empty dental floss containers and underwear packaging in the trash can instead of on the floor. As it stands now, I usually allot the day or two following their decampment to washing towels, piling abandoned garments in baskets, picking up little bits of trash, and vacuuming the remainder.

To be fair, I am aware that it pleases them to wait until the last minute to gather the scattered necessities. At home, one is in at-home mode. It is a time to decompress, as much as is possible, from the obligations of academia, and no one is anxious to attach a whole new set of must-dos to that interlude. I am hardly the picture of the overly put-upon domestic maternal figure, anyway. Don't like it, don't do it...and nobody much cares. But, I do need my visual space. And my personal definition of visual space is essentially the same as not-cluttered. I believe objects must emit a certain type of radio frequency that my brain is unfortunately unable to tune-out, hence the more there are, the more energy that might be put toward attempting to write an intelligent paragraph is diverted to communing with the cacaphony of objects strewn about the kitchen table or the bathroom floor. And I did mean cacaphony. It's almost noise. 

There's another side of it, though, that I noted this morning as I walked into the upstairs hallway and observed the absence of extra people living behind the extra doors. People are a fair trade-off for a reduction in the Spartan simplicity of my space.