The Art of Tidying

I hate tidying. I am a stacker of paper and piler of stuff. It’s my ethos.

And yet, every once in a while, I hit a critical mass and tidying happens. It’s really just reorganization. Sometimes, it is just repiling. And so it was in the days after Christmas.

I am serving on the 2023 Sibert Award Committee, and my 500ish square foot condominium has been housing a growing number of books. If our shared spreadsheet is accurate, I have over 400 nonfiction books.

I had a fantastic system, organizing them in 11 boxes, in alphabetical order. Thank goodness I kept all those boxes from Scholastic Book Fair. They’ve seen me through several moves and are perfect for organizing the books. But they started taking over my home.

The resort started with pulling out the chapter books that will become part of my classroom library and boxing them together in two boxes. They will move to my classroom this week. The rest were reorganized into seven boxes that have been redeployed around my home, opening up some spaces that had been filled with stacked boxes. I had hoped to donate these to the Children’s Book Bank over the break, but, like schools, they were closed until today. I will make a call this week to be sure they want the books. I have a “Plan B” in case they don’t.