I have blog block. I think I’ve written every single thing I know or ever questioned or thought or didn’t know about writing.  There are years and years of posts on this blog of me going on and on about writing and also about houses and my dog and the departed cats and God knows what all. Writing Time feels like a ticking clock. What to post?

Sometimes to get my students unstuck I have them make lists of the things in their life that aren’t going well, or actually driving them nuts, big things and small – and then to choose one thing and write a short essay about it.

If I were to do this exercise right now the mess of my new garage would be at the top of the list.  The mess that was going to be organized in a matter of weeks when I moved in last June. And then fall seemed a more reasonable deadline. Now I’m looking at the first of the year. But do you really want to hear about my chaotic garage that’s turned into some kind of metaphor about my life?  I’m going to pretend you said yes.

Every once in awhile I go out there intending to get things under control, then Nelson’s Halloween dragon costume from five years ago floats up from a box along with the tiny camouflage boots Beatrice and Tom gave him for snow in Lake Arrowhead. About a dozen times I’ve held this stuff in my hands and asked myself the Marie Kondo question: Does this bring me joy? And I hesitate. Then there’s my mother’s purple velvet wedding dress, my father’s income tax returns dating back to 1929, and white wicker furniture from the Hotel Del Coronado that I bought at a swap meet in Long Beach in 1997.

I stand there in the dim light of my garage (it’s dim because there’s no electricity for reasons I don’t totally understand, and I’m embarrassed to open the garage door for fear the neighbors will think they live next door to the Collier Brothers) – and I’m wondering what is wrong with me that I can’t let go of this stuff. Though I am getting better. I gave the guys who poured the new driveway three stuffed Easter Bunnies for their kids.

There’s a recent PS to this story. In the last rain, the drain in the new driveway got blocked and the garage was flooded. Three inches of water! I saved the photographs first, but other boxes, all the years of my own tax returns, the long skirts from the early ‘90’s, memorabilia I had clung to. Unsaveable! Out went Nelson’s damp dragon Halloween costume and tiny camouflage boots, boxes and boxes of stuff all soggy and ruined. It was wonderful.