It’s that time of year – a time of meal planning, gift buying, and -- in the hills of northwest Pennsylvania -- a time for taking the buckboard to town in order to lay in supplies for the stormy winter days ahead (It’s actually snowing a wet, heavy snow as I begin to write this post – accumulating about an inch an hour for a while now. Here we go….)
Now those of you who have been reading From Pencil
Box to Keyboard for a while now know that I am a planner type – some might
say – obsessed a bit with structure and very much drawn to list making as if
lists had strong gravitational pull. Case in point – my Thanksgiving post just
last week was in list format. I
definitely do not fly through my life willy-nilly by the seat of my pants. I am
most comfortable with at least some sort of a plan… even if it is vague. We are who we are….
Anyway – it is that time of year when lists spring up
daily in my head and then appear on my kitchen counter. I keep a list tablet
there... sometimes more than one. Also -- In addition to my list of passwords for various websites, I find
myself awash in other lists. There are
shopping lists – one per holiday meal - in addition to the regular weekly one.
There is a Christmas card address list which needs to be updated soon and a
budding list of things I must remember when doing taxes in the all too near
future. Then there are the daily To Do lists that sometimes spread over a week
and/or across an entire month. Sometimes
I think I need an index list to keep track of all my lists. It’s that bad.
I confess I am awash in lists for sure. Some people are
convinced that we all have these "must do" lists – either mentally, on an
electronic device or ... hand written. I prefer the hand written ones because it is
fun to pick up a pencil and cross off things as I move through the list. It is satisfying. I have
been known to write down something extra and unplanned that I accomplished just
so I can cross it off the list. Yes, really. If it is
a chore list, I always start out with the hardest one – you know -- to get it
checked/crossed off early and out of the way – off the list. (If I do nothing else all day, at least I did that hard to do thing.) But – I think we need to remember that there
are fun lists too. I love to think of
bucket lists and wish lists, of lists of my goals and of the steps I need to do to
get there.
The only thing I don’t really understand is the laundry list. What is a laundry list? Where did that phrase originate? Something to do with a laundry for sure. My life has never had laundries. We always did our own laundry – and that process did not involve lists – only separating whites from darks… and maybe pretreating -- steps in the laundry process that not everyone does anymore - much to my amazement. It also involved me learning to iron starting with my Dad's handkerchiefs. I was 8 and the ironing board seemed very tall. (That was also before steam irons. There was the sprinkle bottle to help you create your own steam, and the irons were heavy -- very heavy.) Remember, too, that was before permanent press. Boomers understand what that entails - something akin to waking up hill both ways. Anyway -- calling a list of seemingly unrelated chores a To Do list is simpler for me… so just check that laundry list question off the question list. Put that on your To Do.
Happy Thursday! It is now twenty-three days until Christmas... just in case you weren't counting down. If you forget the day count, just ask any of your grandkids. Bet they will know. They recently made their Christmas Lists.
