Piles and Piles

I made a mistake," I told Tiffany, looking up from a pile of anti-itch cream, Vitamin C chewables, cold-and-flu relief pills and generic Tums. I had dumped the contents of our "medicine cabinet"--a little bag that a box of stationery came in four years ago--onto the floor outside our bathroom. Let me spell it out for you more clearly. At a time when nearly the entire floor of our new apartment was covered with things from our old apartment, I had chosen to litter the one-square-foot of free space with things we had no immediate use for.

I had already put away most of my clothes in the dresser and on hangers and organized the Tupperware in a drawer in the kitchen (Tiffany promptly reorganized it, but I did do it). I needed something to do to feel productive. There were plenty of existing piles to work with. But Tiffany was organizing the hall closet, which is next to the bathroom. I was tired of being in different rooms, so I sat down with the bag and dumped it out next to her.

She looked at me. I knew she wouldn't be mad because she felt bad for undoing my earlier Tupperware organization.

"Why don't you make piles," she suggested. "That's what I'm doing. Then we can find a place for each pile later."

I half-heartedly moved the two anti-itch creams together and put the cough drops with the generic sudafed. The thermometer (which Tiffany makes me pull out every time she has a cough) was its own pile. I didn't think we needed the bulky boxes the generic tums came in, so I started pulling the foil-wrapped pills out of the open box and...

Tiffany turned. It was as if she sensed my incompetence.

"It might be a good idea to keep pills with their original box," she said diplomatically.

"Oh, I know," I fibbed. "I was just going to put them all in one box."

In reality, I thought the pink chalky-looking tablets would be easily recognizable even years from now when we would again reorganize the medicine cabinet-bag and throw everything out because it had expired (I had an expired pile going too). I stuffed the pills from the opened box into the formerly unopened box. It wouldn't close.

And then I gave up on organizing. We had been at it for hours and were in a work-week-liveable situation, in my view. We could pass through each room in the apartment and the shower curtains were up. We were sore and tired and an hour or so earlier we had both stubbed our toes in the span of a minute. Our first overnight guest (my mom) wouldn't be arriving for three weeks. It was time to stop.

I left Tiffany with her piles and mine and wandered into the kitchen. I made a bunch of turkey burger patties to freeze and kept one out to cook. I made our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for our Monday lunches and mixed up some brownie batter. Then I got in the shower. When I got out, the hall closet was organized and the medicine bag was in the recycling bin, its contents dispersed. I cooked some frozen french fries and our burger and put it all on an unpacked plate to share. I put the brownies in the oven for a later-night treat and made my way to the living room, skirting around our potted plants and empty bookshelves. While I was in the kitchen, Tiffany had hooked up our d.v.d player to our t.v. More importantly, she had cleared the space between our t.v. and our couch: we sat down on it, watched a movie and ate.