A Good Idea

The Sepia Saturday prompt this week is the letter G, as we are working our way through the alphabet. I couldn't find anything appropriate, so I've scraped the bottom of the barrel. G, for this post, introduces a Good Idea.

I watched Marie Kondo's show on NetFlix, Tidying up with Marie Kondo. Although she's a pleasure to watch, two episodes were more than enough. I'm not disorganized enough to benefit from most of her suggestions. The show features people drowning in stuff—epic messes far beyond my experience or imagination—families immobilized by their possessions. We're not that bad. All I have to clean up are two garden storage sheds and fifty boxes of memorabilia which I fear will end up in a thrift shop when Richard dies.

But I have some important organization failings. One of them is my mess of a purse. How I confront the problem every day but continue to endure it, I don't know. It's my Waterloo. I've never managed to have an orderly purse and have so envied my friends who can reach into their bags and effortlessly retrieve an item. If I need something, there will be several minutes of pawing around and cursing and in the end, I'll have to half-empty the purse to find the thing. 

The purse is black outside and inside—the inside is a dark maw. If I drop something into it, the item will probably get interleaved with the one hundred pieces of tissue or the twelve yards of cash register receipts floating around inside. If an item sinks, forget it. Fishing through the layers of paper is tedious and usually unproductive. It's so bad, that I frequently don't put important items into it, preferring a pocket or something I can trust, like my hands. How crazy is that?

I hand carry my phone when I'm shopping because if it drops in the purse, when it rings I have to search to find it, and when I do, it's usually too late and I've annoyed everyone around me with the uber-loud ring (which I have set like as loud as an air raid siren because of my bad hearing and because the phone is often muffled by the purse garbage when it slips to the bottom.) Yes, the purse has exterior pockets, but too many. For me, extra pockets just mean extra searching. 

But all of that is now in the past. This morning, I cleaned out a drawer in the bathroom near where I keep my purse when I'm at home. As Marie instructs, I emptied the purse into it and then from the mess, picked out the items I need—phone, wallet, key fob, pen, post-it notes. The rest remained in the drawer. Every day you do this. 

Purse drawer

Purse and purse drawer

You might say that this is simply cleaning out your purse every day. Not so. Dumping (my word, not Marie's) everything out into a temporary holding area and starting over isn't the same as cleaning it out. Not by a long shot. Dump/empty, I can do. Such is the particular genius of Marie Kondo.  

Stuff from purse

Once a month, you empty out the drawer which you will find is full of tissue and cash register receipts and grocery lists you couldn't find when you needed them, spare change, wrapped mints from restaurants, flyers someone stuck under your windshield wiper, maybe an expired coupon. You do not look at any of it. It's proven itself to be useless by its very presence in the drawer. You dump/empty it all into the garbage.

Stuff remaining after purse is refilled

Using this system, you could actually change purses with confidence that you'll have everything you need. I have ten or fifteen purses, like most women and use none of them, because changing a purse—oh my God—is a huge hassle. 

Speaking as an old dog, I'm very happy to have learned a new trick.

Essentials back in purse