Convent Culture 5: Storage Space

I'm not sure if this is my fourth or fifth blog entry about convent culture. Anyway...

Eight days after my release from the hospital, I am much much better and eating fairly normally.
It's my new normal, on this low residue diet, and watching how much I eat and how fast I eat it.
My memory of the pain and misery of last week will be a big incentive.

This illness has changed any travel plans I had, so I am at home, happily listening to murder mysteries on either CD or ipod, or doing some baking, or praying. Need to get back to writing.

In the meantime, I have been straightening up and weeding out my earthly goods. Went through and organized the winter clothes and separated them from any summer clothes I had never pulled out of the bins. Threw out some fifteen year old shoes that had seen better days.  This activity made me reflect on what I have and where I have it.

 

How many women do you know who have an academic robe and a Cape May sweatshirt hanging on their bathroom door?

I live in one room, and whatever doesn't fit in that room is stored in the one storeroom that eight of us share.

I have two shelves in the storeroom. The shelf with the maroon bins and the shelf with the grey bins are my shelves. Anything that doesn't fit in my room goes there.

We have a common clothes rack in the storeroom where most of us hang our winter coats and jackets.

That's it.

Clutter happens easily when I am in a hurry, or when I come back from travelling and don't get things back in their designated space.

 

 

oh... almost forgot the trunk of the car. I don't own a car; it belongs to my religious community. I have it for my use, because I need it to get back and forth to school, and to do the grocery shopping.  But the trunk becomes a catch-all for everything from a camp chair to a snow shovel.

 

 

 

When I think of photos of convent "cells" with nothing but a bed and a chair, I realize how much "stuff" I have.  But when I think of my well-loved married friends who have houses full , I realize I don't have much.  Everything is relative.

 

Books are my addiction, as is the case with most English teachers and writers.