Right now, this very minute my den/office/bedroom/playroom is a disaster.  With the influx of new toys and all the other things that come with Christmas and the holidays, the walls in my house seem to be moving inward to entrap me.  I don’t want to end up like those two old guys found dead in their New York apartment several years ago.  They were surrounded by newspapers and books stacked up to the ceiling with dirty plates, old toast and silverware scattered around their bodies.

Said room is where I would like to write, and I believe if it were clean and uncluttered, I could enjoy a creative, inspired writing session.

On Sunday, January 4, I vowed to sort through things and de-clutter.  I got as far as pulling eight Barbie dolls out of my granddaughter’s collection of approximately one thousand, but she discovered me in the act and said as I pulled them out one by one, “Grandma, I CANNOT throw this one out.  It’s special to me.”

No writing got done that day.

I decided to go through the Barbies on Monday when she was in school.  Around noon, I received a call from her school.  Maddy was not feeling well and not strong enough to go back to class, and they couldn’t reach her mother, who was somewhere on the Prospect Studios lot showing some temperamental show writer office space. I was so jealous of that person.  He or she could actually write in his or her very own, uncluttered office and unlike me, didn’t have to pick up a 2^ndgrader from the nurse’s office.  If he or she did have children, the nanny would surely pick them up and take care of any needs they might have.

No writing got done that day.

On Tuesday, my husband and I went to the gym for our Silver Sneakers class, and yes, there’s another story there, for later.

In the afternoon a contractor came by to look at our 1950s bathroom to see how he could spruce it up for only$15000 – $30,000.  When he left, it was time for a good cry and dinner prep.

No writing got done that day.

Wednesday, I am sitting down to WRITE!  But wait, first I must go to OSH for some boxes to help with the de-cluttering thing. Remember that?

It’s now 11:00 a.m., and of course, I found time to eat breakfast, drink coffee, meditate, pray and do my new Qi Gong DVD, which arrived yesterday.  I had another Qi Gong DVD, but it was lost in the great abyss of the bookshelf in that very same room. It has never surfaced and no one admits to “borrowing” it.

Thursday, I stayed home in the morning because a person was bringing us some important papers to sign. No, not commitment papers or divorce papers – yet.

The documents were incorrect, so we sent that person off.  He was disgusted and not happy with us and our attention to detail.

We went to Silver Sneakers after meeting the document guy.

After Silver Slippers, we were starving, naturally, because of all that exercise, so we went out to lunch. Then we needed a nap, of course.  Also, that pretty much killed Thursday as far as cleaning out the den/office/bedroom/playroom-so-that-I-could-write-project, and so, you guessed it…

No writing got done that day.

The room remains largely unchanged.  I did manage to sneak out about twenty Barbie dolls into the trash early one morning, and I bagged a dozen stuffed creatures.  They now live in a plastic bag in my car.

My sister-in-law, who writes a weekly column for her local newspaper told me that she, too, has to have everything in order before she feels free enough to sit down and write, and she’s married to my brother, who is a neat freak!  (Later, it was hard to hear from her that he might not be the neat freak I always thought he was.) Her kids have moved out of the house, so what does she have to clean?   Truthfully, it did make me feel better about my inability to write in a messy place due to the fact that she’s a really good writer and much smarter than I.

I’m trying to keep in mind the sermon our minister gave a couple of weeks ago.  He said that if we don’t change our patterns, how can we expect any change in our lives.  I believe he borrowed that from a statement often attributed to Albert Einstein.

But what do my minister and Albert Einstein know about decluttering?  They’re men. Men have separate compartments for the things in their lives.  There’s the sex compartment, the yard compartment, the garage compartment, the work compartment, and…the dining room.

I have only one compartment in my mind, and it’s still a messy one.  I just move things around or put them in boxes in the same old room, fantasizing about the perfect writing life.

I suppose I did write this.

 

The End.