Tonight, I'm cleaning out my closet.

My husband and I are very much alike in many ways. In other ways, we could not be more different. Trevor is very unemotional. He is logical and makes decisions based on logic. In a crisis, he remains calm and cool, with all his wits about him. I, on the other hand, am an emotional wreck. My decisions are based on emotion most of the time - my first reaction is always emotional. And in a crisis, you can't count on me to remain calm.

These emotional qualities transfer to other parts of our lives as well. If you are looking for a man who will send you flowers and serenade you - Trevor is not your man. I have come to accept this, because he shows his love for me in so many other ways. He doesn't really get emotional about any people - he doesn't ever say that he "misses" someone. He doesn't cry at funerals. He's not sad when someone moves away. Its all part of life, he says.

There are, however, things he IS emotional about. The first is our pets. This is how I know that he does actually have emotions. He loves our 5 pets more than you can imagine. He loves all animals. Even stuffed animals. When he was a child - I'm thinking around 10 or so. He went to a little store by his house and there were some lamps, with stuffed bears on them. All the lamps had a bear and a baby bear - except one. That lamp had a single bear on it. Trevor felt bad for the bear because it was all alone. So he bought that lamp. And still has it.



I tell this story because over the weekend, we did a major house cleaning. We have lived in this house for 8 years. Every closest, every drawer, every inch of possible storage space was full. I don't really know where all this stuff came from. The past few months, it has been strangling me. Now that our store is open, we have less time to take care of things at home. I feel like every time I come home there is laundry to do, dirty dishes in the sink, clean dishes in the dishwasher needing put away. I feel overwhelmed. For a while now I have wanted to get a dumpster and put it in the front yard and throw out everything.

This feeling boiled over right after Christmas. Our vet had delivered us a holiday package. I'm pretty sure it must have only been sent to his top revenue producing patients, because it was a lot of stuff. One of the items was this:



Which is nice, but what the hell am I going to do with that? We had it in the front room for a while and then we were cleaning up. Trevor gave it to me to take upstairs and put in a closet. I refused. I said we should just throw it away. Trevor got really upset and started talking about how someone made this nice gesture to give it to us and we can't just throw it away - we should give it to someone. This went on for a while and ended with Trevor saying something like this "if we have to throw this away, we should throw your wedding dress away too". At that point, I was ready for a divorce. I could not understand how this person who had no emotional attachment to anything human, could have so much emotional attachment to such things!

In the end, Trevor put this present from our vet in the garage. This past weekend, Trevor surprised me by being very aggressive with the house cleaning. He didn't show emotion to things, like I expected. Few items made the cut - we took three truck loads of stuff to Goodwill and another truck load to the dump. We can now see the floors of the closet and have lots of drawers that are empty. The garage floor is clean, things are in their place. I feel lighter, more free, uncluttered.

There are, of course, a few things that we did not give or throw away....and here are two of them. And should there ever be a divorce - these are the only two things I will want.