Rearrangement

As long as my world keeps on changing,
it’s going to require rearranging.
Poor Pasiano bears the brunt
of labor as we shift and hunt
for repair tiles for the bath.
Their tiny chips create a path
from cabinet through the garage,
joining others in the barrage
of hidden things brought to the light
that fill my garage like a blight.

For fifteen years, we have been stacking
tiles here in their paper packing.
But boxes stowed away so nice
have since been frequented by mice
who ate away their once sharp edges
so tiles fall on shelves and ledges,
spilling out to bite the dust
of chewed up paper and dirt and rust.
All these years of accumulation
lead to mess and perturbation.

Would that I’d left it as it was,
hidden out of sight, because
now we have this awful mess
and to be truthful, I must confess,
I’ve lost my patience for this sorting.
I would rather be cavorting
in the pool or on the page.
Instead, I search and stack and rage.
Dusty, back-sore, tired, deranged—
I also have been rearranged!

(Click on first photo to enlarge pictures and read captions.)

One problem is the salitre that has risen up through my Saltillo tiles throughout the house.

But this meant sorting through 15 years of boxes of tile to see if I had enough marble tiles as well as mosaic tiles that would match the ones presently in my bathroom.

Unfortunatey, not only were all of my boxes of the many different tiles used in my house stored in a difficult cabinet to reach, but also, mice seemed to have used the boxes they were in for material to build nests.

This meant removing all the tiles and a trip to the dread Walmart to try to find boxes small enough to store them in so they would fit back into the narrow cabinet.

Neither a fun project nor an unmessy one.

The prompt word today is “rearrange.”  How appropriate. In the next month, I’ll be replacing all the floor tiles in my house and changing my oversized built in tub into a shower.  Major remodeling here, and it was necessary to sort through an entire cabinet in the garage to try to find tiles to match the wall and tub tiles and marble inlay.  As you have seen above, it was no easy task, thanks to 15 years of rodent activity hidden away in the recesses of the difficult-to-access storage cabinet where we’d been stacking different tiles for years.