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A tidy home is just you with all your stuff set around the edges of the room on shelves, in cupboards or stacked in CD racks organized by genre, not title. Food in the fridge, rubbish in the bin, dirty clothes in the hamper and clean ones in the closet. Cleaning up is taking things from the centre of the room and putting them all back around the edges, tables being the only things allowed to stray from a wall. This makes them aloof by the way.

We have begun taking objects from around the edges of the rooms and placing them in boxes. Now the boxes are around the edges of the room. Piled like cairns in some places, others alone on the floor by the door no doubt waiting to go somewhere. They are not allowed on our edges anymore, they have to go further out. Salvation Army, hospital bookshop, local landfill. The rest of the boxes wait and read each others labels to judge fragility, which is a sign of status to them.

In 10 days a large box on wheels will receive the patient boxes, the ones not sent away, and transport them to a new place. And our stuff will be removed from the boxes in the reverse order it was packed, that is by how long one can go without needing it, and placed around new edges. Some things will feel at home, will fit perfectly and be happy, other things like the long table which fit nicely in our old kitchen will feel awkward and will stand out. We will trip on them and no place will be suitable and they will fall out of favour. We will wonder why we even bothered to move it, being so heavy and the wobbly leg we blamed on the floor will now belong again to the table and it will appear shabby. It will be moved further out, perhaps to the veranda where sun and rain will finish the concept.

We keep people on our edges and we order them by how long we can go before we need them and sometimes we mistake familiarity for shabbiness. We let those people weather until they fade away and sometimes we miss them but usually we don’t. It’s just the way it is.