Reblogged from Bun Karyudo:

Yes,” my father would say to my eight-year-old brother and me as he looked around the bedroom we shared, “A place for everything and everything in its place.” Then he would shake his head, burst into tears and be comforted as he was led from the room.

It wasn’t that we disregarded his advice. It made perfect sense to us that when everything had a proper place, nothing need ever become lost again. It was simply that, having gone through the famous aphorism very carefully and examined the small print, it was our considered legal opinion that the place in question had not been clearly defined and was thus open to a certain amount of interpretation.

This being the case, it was hardly surprising that we took our place to be the bedroom floor. Such an arrangement did, after all, offer the seemingly unbeatable combination of ease-of-access and certainty of location. No more stretching to high shelves. No more reaching into deep drawers. Whatever the item, it was always in the same convenient direction, namely, down. Nor was there ever the slightest doubt about precisely where any object was to be found. The answer was the same every time: somewhere around the ankles.

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