My daughter is not the cleanest of kids—more like a hoarder who can’t bear to part with the tiniest scraps of paper. I torture her with a weekly cleansing of her dumping grounds—I mean bedroom—where I toss and reteach her the importance of keeping her space orderly.

“Everything has a place, put it in its space,” I’ve said more times than I care to count.

After more than a decade, I think I’m starting to get through to her…sort of. More than once this week her dirty clothes lay in front of my bathroom door. The hamper is inside the bathroom, so I guess this is progress. The dirty clothes are no longer a growing pile in the corner of her room.

Maybe after another decade I’ll be able to convince her to walk the five extra steps and actually put her clothes in the hamper.