My garden calendar includes many seasons: garden design work in late winter, seed starting and garden clean up in early spring, an insanity of planting in May and June, weeding and harvesting in summer, more harvesting and garden clean up in fall then more garden dreaming in early winter.

For Jim there are TWO SEASONS: Cleaning up Molly’s OUTSIDE MESSES (spring through fall) and cleaning up Molly’s INSIDE MESSES (fall through winter).

Cleaning MY MESSES is always a very complicated fight negotiation. The problem is, I don’t experience some of the things that DRIVE JIM CRAZY as messes. He, however, does.

Take for example his current CLEAN UP project. On the backside of one of our sheds, there is a big shelf where I store all my seed starting stuff. Any time I buy a six pack of seedlings or a plant, I save the plastic to use in my own greenhouse starts. I’ve been saving this stuff since 1987. So yeah, I have a lot of plastic containers on the shelves. Big deal! It’s fine! They sit OUTSIDE on a MOLDY OLD SHELF doing ABSOLUTELY NO HARM TO ANYONE. But Jim has decided that this area is in dire EXTREME need of cleaning. No one has a view of this shelf from anywhere. There is room for everything on the shelves. But IT IS A CRISIS like explosive diarrhea or lice.

Today is the tail end of the three day Nor’easter. Jim could be inside reading a detective story wearing a smoking jacket with a glass of cognac, but instead he is out there DEALING WITH THE SITUATION.

To prepare for battle this particular clean up, Jim has built a mighty shelf on the inside of the shed. This shelf could easily handle gold bricks, yet it will be called upon to store Jim’s idea of a select group of plastic pots. Jim also has begun the annoying delicate process of taking stuff off my moldy shelves to decide what to keep on the new shelves and what to recycle. The first thing he pulled out was my black plastic flats. These hold transplants of seedlings once they are growing in individual pots. Jim decided I needed 30 of these flats. I pointed out that I used at least 10 of these for my tomatoes ALONE, so I wasn’t sure 30 would get it done. He countered by noting that all the ones he’d selected for recycling were poorly constructed or broken. Welcome to America Jim, that’s how things are made here.

So….. basically things have started off with a bang well. I hope the wind and rain picks up enough to force Jim to come in. I’ll have the smoking jacket waiting. Then I can sneak down and pull some of the black plastic flats from his recycle pile.

Tomorrow when the storm ends, we will examine the five thousand hundred other objects on these shelves with the same level of disharmony. Should be fun.

All this is in preparation for Jim coming inside for the season of INSIDE MESSES. This winter he plans to redo our kitchen. He will replace our forty year old cabinetry that was junky when we installed it but has now broken down completely. In order to force me to do this redo get me ready for this exciting project, Jim has let these broken shelves FALL OFF so that now the cupboards are wide open and the need for action ( think Explosive diarrhea and lice) is evident.

My cherished butterball paddles, madeleine cookie tins and steamed pudding molds are now revealed in all their glory. This has led Jim to sweetly suggested that MAYBE we don’t NEED four steamed pudding molds in the new kitchen. I plan to just nod in agreement about everything he wants to recycle then take what he considers to be extra down to the new shelves in the shed.

Whew! He won’t notice this pile until next spring!