What do Martha Stewart, Marie Kondo and Margareta Magnusson have in common?

Collectively they are killing me.  Let’s start with Martha.

She’s posting blog photos taken at her beautiful home prepping for Easter. She confides that decorating started a week ago. There isn’t a blank surface anywhere. There are chickens and rabbits, moss and bare tree branches and a vat of decorated eggs from Easters past. Martha ends her tour to go dye more eggs, she figures she needs 270 for the 2018 hunt.

And then there is Marie, the super-organizer and author, whose best-seller (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up)  instructs the organizationally challenged to clutch an object tightly and get rid of it, if it fails to spark joy.  Over 2 million copies sold.

Margareta, an artist and author from Sweden, is a new kid on the Self-Help block, with her book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (döstädning). Swedes have somewhat of a reputation for not wanting to be a bother. If you declutter while you can, your death isn’t such a burden on those you leave behind.

Listen M, M, & M, I love your entrepreneurial spunk and your business acumen. I wish you much present and future prosperity and happiness.

However, in the middle of catching up with Netflix movies, I am deeply gloomy, thinking of eggs and getting electrocuted and who really wants my front porch glider. On the other hand, I learned how to put dots over a vowel and found a word that rhymes with tostada.

Some days just hold more promise than others. Today is one of them.

I have so many choices: go to a movie, rake leaves, play Free Rice, read Billy Collins, enter a contest, order something online, sort through my desk, get a bag ready for Goodwill, try out a recipe, read the fiction in the New Yorker, do the Sunday cross word puzzle, take photos, re-arrange the mantel, download music, go to the health club, wash the car and — I’ll start with Billy Collins.

Vade Mecum

I want the scissors to be sharp

and the table to be perfectly level

when you cut me out of my life

and paste me in that book you always carry.

I looked up vade mecum. It means handbook or manual small enough to be carried along where ever. And vade is pronounced, vadee, it’s latin meaning “go with me.” I took three years of Latin in high school, had it started, “All of Gaul is divided into three parts,” I would have nailed it.

After sign-in, weigh-in, check-in, they herded in a semi-circle to share. “Stop the palaver,” she shouted in her head. Then slumped on her fold-up chair seeing her salubrious future with a round lugubrious face. As the group droned, she imagined the taste of a red velvet cake.