helping a friend

today was the first of five free days between the end of one job and the beginning of another. i spent the entire day helping a friend pack/unpack into a new house (tomorrow is the actual move and i’m guessing i’ll be around for that as well). some people might say this is a terrible way to spend a day off and others might admire my magnanimosity (is that a word?) but really it was a desperate ploy to avoid cleaning my own house. plus, it feels so nice to help a friend. and it truly is easier to work on someone else’s mess than your own. the way i figure it, when you’re dealing with someone else’s mess, what you see is, say, a scattered pile of branches in the laundry room. what she sees is a collection of driftwood that the family collected on a very pleasant vacation to the beach. or, what she might see at my house is a partially shrunken, knobby green wool sweater sitting on the dryer that should be put away somewhere, whereas i see a sweater that i bought in order to shrink it and then cut it up and sew something and then when i washed and dried it, it didn’t really shrink as much as i thought it would and also it got really bulky so it might be too thick to go through the sewing machine and maybe at this point it’s not too small for someone out there to wear, but on the other hand, if i tried to shrink it more, maybe it would eventually get compact enough that i could sew it. so in essence, other people’s messes look like a pile of things, our own piles are layered thick with stories or “yes, but’s” or issues of one kind or another and it’s just so much harder to deal with things when they’re tangled up in issues. so, i’ve escaped cleaning my own house for another day and i have the virtuous feelings that come from helping a friend all day. hooray! now if i could just hire a house elf…