with cool air comes great cleansing

upon the arrival of central air conditioning upstairs, a contraption birthed untidily to a welcoming audience one summer evening (like a percentage of infants are wont to do), i decided to embark upon a bedroom-cleaning adventure in cool artificial freshness.

my secluded third-floor bedroom generally had not been rearranged or redecorated even in the smallest of ways since i first moved up there, around age twelve. it was very dusty and cluttered and juvenile, to say the least. it was almost as bad as miss havisham's eerie twenty-of-nine clock-stopping and wedding-cake preservation (but not quite). and it was mostly all because of the heat! that dreaded summer sweat that adhered my shirt to my back and tickled my upper lip. eeueghsh. i didn't like that very much. and come winter, it was so cold that no number of sweaters could ease the icy numbness. (fall and spring, of course, were muddled in the terrible studying frenzy of geography and biology, etc., and i could scarcely even tell i was in my bedroom at all for all the papers and pencils strewn about.)

and so i never dwelled long enough in my bedroom to move things about or take down the ugly little pictures on my wall and replace them with pretty things better representing my maturing interests. eventually my bedroom became a cage plastered with the unwelcome reminders of my awkward twelve-year-old self, an unopinionated, unimpassioned, uncomfortable child (shudder).

but since the installation of central air--oh sheesh, my imagination and vacuum cleaner have been running wildly. it's such a liberating task, deep-cleaning my room. it's taken me a while, but it is daily becoming easier for me to throw things away. you see, these stupid little things have been in my room so long that it's almost as if they've surpassed the stage of mere existence and moved on to some state of immovable intangibility. "no," my subconscious yells, "i can't throw away that gaudy faux-porcelain figurine--it's been sitting in the same spot on that shelf for so long that it's lost its ability to be disposed of, and if i move it, i think there will be a small, bear-shaped black hole forever and ever and ever."

but i toss it in the trash, and hark! no black hole! rather, a blank canvas. with what shall i fill it? oh, it's so exciting.

it has taken many days, and will take many more (i am an easily-distracted cleaner--i found a box of ten-year-old letters from my summer camp pen-pal! i couldn't just leave those unread, you know). but now, when i walk into my bedroom, i begin to think to myself, "why yes, the present annie huntington does reside here. the annie huntington who actually knows who she is and what she prefers to display on her shelves."