Listening to the Whisper Within

I used to be a clutter person.  Borderline hoarder.  It was hard to let go of stuff and live in peace.   Order was foreign.  Boxes were everywhere.  No doubt it reflected my inner space and how I dealt with the world.  Things just seemed out of my control.  In my defense, I moved a lot.  But these days I am pretty organized. I still store a giant bin of unorganized photos in the basement and have to continually remind myself to edit piles of paper that mound up like Mount Vesuvius, coming to eat me alive.  But I am no longer feeling out of control and harassed by objects in my living space.  But curiously, I have a hard time decorating my home.  Although I snap my fingers like a wizard and design our rentals with standard stainless steel appliances, wood floors, Sherwin Williams Edgecomb Gray painted walls (it goes with everything!) with bright white wood trim, decorating my own home is like squeezing a wood sliver out from the pad of my big toe.  Painful.  And bloody. There have been tears.  The truth is I feel lucky to live in a post and beam home with a wood stove and old pine floors in the woods of Maine.  My husband's friend once said as he entered our abode, "You home is like a hug." Yes, it is.  My husband built it thirty years ago with his first wife and kids.  But now, the worn pine floors long for love and refinishing.  The tile countertops and crumbing grout need care. The cabinets throughout belong in a graveyard.  All the faucets and fixtures are antiques.  Our home needs obvious updating and renovating.  But, furthermore, and maybe more importantly, I have always wanted to make where my husband and I live and love our home vs. my husband's old house. My usual way is to spend hours thinking about what color the clawfoot tub should be painted in the downstairs bathroom.  Or should I even keep it.  I watch Flip or Flop on HGTV.  I think and don't act.  I imagine and dream and then go make dinner.  However, the other day I was done, over, wanting to set the white-turned-grey bath mats on fire in our upstairs bathroom.  So I hopped online to buy some new.  As I scrolled through beige, white, pale blue bathmats online, like some gremlin was in charge and inhabiting me, Woodland green rugs kept populating in the checkout box at about the same time I detected a faint whispering in my ear, and taking control of my finger, "Pick these."  My head said, "No.  Never.  Pick white.  White always goes with anything." And even though my brain wonders what the the hell happened to the neutral white bathmats, I am in absolute love with my dark green rugs that dry my feet like a a carpet of soft moss underfoot after a shower and keep my feet warm like a field of green grass on a toasty sun-filled day when I sit on the toilet in the middle of the night to pee.  These days, I am trying to allow my feelings.  I am open to hearing that little voice in my head who's been hiding and maybe yearning to be heard.  This weekend I bought a bouquet of jewel-toned zinnias at the farmer's market.  A local guy grows them in a field.  I also buy his Maine Maple granola and eat it with yogurt and raspberries most mornings for breakfast.  I usually put my weekly bouquet of flowers in my kitchen but this time that little voice was louder.  So instead I plunked them into one of my bendy Smithsonian Museum glasses I rarely use and stuck them on the bathroom vanity.  It's like a light switch was turned on.  No more white rugs and bland decor. This, apparently, is me.