The Girl Cave

I’m in the process of cleaning out my garage. It’s just a little one-car garage, but I spent the summer staring warily at the closed door, thinking that if I really worked, I could make my car fit in there before the snow flies.

So I go out there, open up the door, and the garage is, of course, just a sea of boxes and bags. Everything is balanced precariously within the chaos, as if one sneeze could bring it all down. The trampoline is scattered in pieces and our grill provides a base for a bag of old toys. Clothing of every size and style since birth for all of us is stuffed into cracks between boxes in plastic recycling bags. And I’m pretty sure the stuff is multiplying when no one is looking. This was fine, when we had the huge house with a full attic and basement. But now we don’t have the space, so the stuff can’t just lie around anymore.

I’m going to be honest here and say that I think there’s more than one reason that cleaning the garage is normally a boy job. I wrestled (literally) with a leaking garden hose for over a half an hour before I could roll it up. I won, but the hose gets credit for keeping me totally pinned for the majority of the fight. I finally got it onto the hose thingy, but it’s ugly workmanship and I don’t ever want to do that again. Like the wasps and the faucet filter, this is not a Shelly job, not if she can help it.

Once I made some actual headway (meaning that boxes got stacked high and an actual path was formed) the room took on a cozy quality. I started looking at the loveseat that we had standing up on end in the chaos, thinking about putting it beneath the garage window in back, with the end table beside it. Holly, my helper who is always up for an adventure, gave me all the encouragement I needed. We moved a table, a bunch of boxes, and the trampoline before we could move the couch into the corner. Then we took down the extra kitchen chairs and set them up, went into the house and made Lean Pockets for dinner, and sat out there eating them on the couch with a blanket over our laps. We named it our girl cave.






Maybe this is why the garage is normally not girl territory?



But in our house, all we have is girls. And since I have to do the hose rolling, and the car will probably never fit, we just made it homey.