Nesting Craze. Emphasis on Craze.

So, I'm nesting. Like crazy. Full-fledged move-around-the-furniture, Container-Store-get-ready-for-business, organizational explosion of energy. I'd estimate the 99 percent of the tasks I have labored to complete are things which make absolutely no visible difference to people who visit my house. In other words my house still looks like a piece of shit. Its still messy and cluttered. We still are short about three bedrooms. NONETHELESS. Things are way better for those of us who inhabit the tiny abode.

I have replaced the rings which hold the shower curtain in place because the old ones aways fell off and every time I've bended over to retrieve a piece-of-crap shower curtain ring for the past three years, I have vowed to replace them with the kind that close all the way around the rod and now, folks, that immensely annoying circumstance will occur no more . I have fitted cheap Ikea frames with custom mattes so I can finally hang up wall art given to us seven years ago as a baby gift.

I have sorted through the five years' worth of artwork that my son has produced, which I have been shoving into boxes and hoarding like a person on the TV show of the same name. If left un-edited permanently, this collection of artwork would, unquestionably, bury our whole family. In another few years, you'd enter my front door only to find yourself waist-deep in ripped-out spiral-notebook pages covered with line drawings of zombies, and you'd see a desperate, petrified hand reaching out from the sea of paper. That would have been me. Thankfully, nesting saved me

The domestic task which really filled me with gratification, however, was replacing the batteries of an old-school, ten pound flashlight that hasn't worked in, oh, over a decade, and which I have packed and moved from one apartment to the next to this most recent one ALL WITHOUT EVER BOTHERING to change the batteries. At long last, I unscrewed the damn thing. I found out which kind of battery it required (four Ds, like a 1990s boom box). I bought those batteries. I put them in. The feeling I experienced when I pressed the button on the top of the flashlight and the thing responded with ILLUMINATION was amazing, transcendent. It was a rush of euphoria similar to what I remember feeling when I could still drink alcohol, four million years ago, before I became pregnant. It lasted approximately 10 seconds. Still, it was worth it.

This kind of labor, like parenting, goes largely unnoticed and totally under-appreciated. My husband, for instance, who does the dishes and laundry and cleans the bathroom and basically tends to all household cleaning obligations, is not impressed with my sudden and insane burst of organizational zeal and less impressed with its invisible results.

He observed this yesterday, when he walked in to find the sink piled high with dishes, the coffee table laden with crumbs and the toilet clogged: "This house is still a fucking mess."