Brown Bagging

The first time I remember brown bagging my home was when David was coming to dinner. To help you understand why I did what I did let me give you some background.

When I was a university student I met David. He was in one of my honors classes and I immediately became interested in him. He was funny, clever, very talented and just an all around interesting guy. The entire term I did everything to let him know I would very much like him to ask me out...he never took the hint. A few years later I went on several fantastic double dates with him and became his friend. (He was my date's good friend.)

After I married and moved out of state my husband and I attended an east coast alumni dinner that David and his wife attended as well; turns out my husband was also a good friend of David's. We visited, caught up and exchanged phone numbers.

Then in the middle of a busy week in which most of my time had been devoted to church and compassionate service I received a phone call from David telling me he would be in D.C. for the weekend. Would it be possible for us to meet him and go out to dinner?

(restaurant money, babysitter, gas to get there? No, not on this month's budget)

“We would love to see you David can you come for dinner?” We set the time, I gave him directions and I hung up the phone and looked at my home. Ugg! Arg! What had I done? My house needed serious attention. And I still had other promises to fulfill.

And that is how I came to “brown bag” my home. What does that mean? You gather a bunch of shopping bags and quickly pick up everything on any surface in the living room and dining room that needs to be out of sight or somewhere else. At that time our study and my sewing room shared space in the dining room. So all the stacks of projects on my sewing machine and on the desk were whisked into separate shopping bags. Then you carry the shopping bags to somewhere safe and out of sight. Most of it fit into my clothes closet but there were a few bags that I crammed into the hall linen closet. Then and this is VERY IMPORTANT you go to your personal calendar and write in big letters on a date after the guest has left “sort and put away shopping bags”.

Then with all the toys, dirty and clean clothes, sewing, papers etc. out of the way I could focus on vacuuming and dusting and mopping and planning an impressive dinner.

We really enjoyed David's visit and I was completely at ease because I was not embarrassed by the condition of our home.

The day after his visit I took the shopping bags and dumped them out onto my made bed. It was easy to sort everything into piles according to the room they belonged in, throw away the trash, then carry each pile to the place it belonged. In fact much quicker than if I had tried to sort everything before I had put them into shopping bags.

And thus a tradition was born!

Fortunately my circumstances have improved. My sewing room, study, and toy room no longer share space with the dining room table so “brown bagging” happens a lot less frequently. But it is nice to know in a pinch how quickly I can improve the look of any room. :-)

a month or two later David came and spent the weekend with us bringing his wife and children with him. I was thankful that I was better organized that week and the house just needed a little tidying up to prepare for their visit. We immensely enjoyed our time visiting the Smithsonian together as a group and I greatly admire his wife. We both married great men.