future projects
From where I sit, I’m can see a pile made up of mostly papers; there are drawings, school work, errant kid valentines, unread New Yorker magazines, notebooks, school take home folders, a camera in a camera case and, at the base of the stack, is Brendan’s boyhood copy of The Way Things Work. A paper bag with a flower painted on it sits on top. Other nearby artifacts include, the girls’ school empty backpacks along with their winter coats, hung in suspended animation, worn on a few occasions back when the air was colder and we went out for longer. Two well-worn pairs of headphones, their wires tangled and curled, more than one used tissue crumpled up into a wad and discarded just anywhere. Wrinkled post-it notes. Normally, I’d have tidied this pile within a week of its forming, but not now. Not now. Not now, pile!, I say, realizing that even though the outside world is at a standstill, I am still moving around this space, spinning like a top in this small apartment. What keeps me busy now is different though, time is occupied by trying to complete the day’s distance learning, connecting with friends, cooking, eating, cleaning the kitchen, cooking and cleaning again.
Normally, I would have had a busy run of days, spent mostly out of the house, riding the subway, teaching, riding the subway, meeting, eating, eating on the subway to the next thing and on like this for a few days until I had worked up the domestic potential energy needed to burrow inward and reverse-nest. I would attack the bookshelf with its dusty collection of trinkets, toys, pictures, etc. and clean, tidy, toss and reorganize until things felt right again. I would tackle the spot just inside the front door of the apartment, you know the one, the place where inanimate objects just materialize, almost by themselves, and I sort and recycle 99% of the crap that had collected there and feel good about life. I can picture myself opening the bathroom cabinet, cluttered and suffering from months of neglect. I see myself listening to music, the kids in bed, meditatively organizing, busy and happy.
I love love love to get rid of things. It brings a particular joy to my heart. The feeling of hauling heavy bags of no-longer-needed stuff down the stairs and out the door makes me feel like I’ve chopped a cord of wood. Letting go of crap feels like freeing up space inside my mind. I need all the space I can get.
Alas, there is nowhere to donate much of anything these days and my local Buy Nothing group has rightly shifted focus to only things pandemic-related, so things I would normally share, stay. The objects that could potentially be enjoyed by others are gathering dust in my house. The bags of clothes I hadn’t yet taken to the donation box are stuffed back into my closet again and again. The giveaway shirts might even migrate back into my drawers, or become masks or capes, or the girls might grow into them. The paper shopping bag stuffed with recycled paper towel tubes, yogurt containers, egg cartons, saved for a future project that doesn’t involve looking at a screen. For now, these extra things stay. I can’t seem to find a good reason to unearth them.
