Last weekend, one of my industrious activities was altering the sleeves on a couple of shirts. In the process, I ran out of thread on a spool. It’s been YEARS since that happened. Those are my bifocals pictured with the sewing stuff. Since the surgery, they’ve actually been useful to me for the first time since I got that prescription…last July. Progress.
I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I tried to take a nap after meds and breakfast and eye drops and all the things. Nap wasn’t happening. So I kicked into gear and started doing things that I had no idea I intended to do.
First, I began to gather things for donation. These were my first items–some pristine stuffed animals, Houston Rockets souvenirs, lots and lots of throw pillows (none that were sewn for me, but including four I once sewed for myself), a couple of gently used quilted bedspreads and pillow shams, other bed linens, a beautiful shower curtain we haven’t used for years, some clothing, and all my old VHS tapes (if those Disney movies are worth something, then I hope someone with more energy than I have grabs them from one of the Goodwill stores and eBays the crap out of them). I’m sure there was more, because by the time I had it all gathered for Tom to load in the car after work, both dining tables were covered. The items have been donated!
We started a redo in the large guest bedroom (aka Lynne’s room), but it’ll be a few days before I can share photos because it’s a work in progress. Naturally, I failed to take before photos of anything, but I may have some old ones that’ll work.
I turned a brutal eye on the second guest room, or since 2020, the Writing Sanctuary (which at different times has been called the Butterfly Room, the Winnie the Pooh Room, and maybe the Quilt Room; I can’t keep up).
Here’s an example of how the bed can look in here when I’m full-on writing and otherwise multitasking. This is from mid-May.
That’s the collaged sketchbook I keep my completed coloring pages in, my wee CD player, the CD binder I’m STILL in (it’s like the freaking 1974 of CD binders), my day planner, Patti Smith’s book that I often use as a prompt when I’m writing in my day planner, the binder that I keep up with my bills in. So… that day, I was writing, listening to music, coloring, paying bills, and journaling. Behind it all, against the wall, is a little crate where I keep a bunch of the books I use for blogging ideas. Keep those books in the back of your mind while I move on.
I didn’t take a photo of the cabinet in here. The big box of CDs that won’t fit in binders was on it. A lot of medical stuff post-surgery. But other than all that extra stuff, the top part usually looked like this.
Some doll muses, a little bit of Dennis Wilson and Beach Boys stuff, Beatles-related stuff, and up top, a shadowbox with mementos of our late friend Steve and photos of him.
I was ready for some order and some change. Below, I’ll share a photo of the shadowbox (reminder: Winnie the Pooh and Piglet were our thing–on the top of the cabinet, not pictured here, there’s usually a stuffed version of both that Steve kept in the hospital with him, plus a Pooh bear Lynne made that I’d given to our late friend John). Those are now in a cabinet with the other stuffed animals because after I donated some, I had room for them. It’ll be better to keep them dust-free.
The shadowbox has been this way since… 1992? ’93? Shiny fabric lining the back was wrapped around the amethyst crystal hanging in there (upper right), a gift from Steve to me one Christmas, put together by one of his RNs, Billie, from a metaphysical shop she owned, and secured into a bag tied with gold cord that I don’t think is visible in this photo. It also contained a dried rose that’s hanging in here toward the middle. Next to the amethyst crystal is a quartz crystal that Steve kept around his neck most of the time. A tiny mirror has fallen behind the Pooh scene I cut out of a greeting card. I never asked, but maybe there was a time before I met him when he and his friends did bumps off that mirror. It was the ’70s, it was the ’80s, and everyone was young and beautiful and life was a party until AIDS crashed it.
So now you need to remember those writing prompt books and this shadow box, while I show you this.
A lovely little pillow I bought sometime in the ’90s, cross-stitched with a scene featuring Winnie, Tigger, and Piglet. After the turn of the century, a young dog with a penchant for destroying linens and other fabric items chewed up part of this pillow. Could have been Margot; could have been Guinness. I well remember their team and individual exploits. Anyway, it’s been on top of that cabinet, too, and today I took it apart.
It became part of the redone shadowbox. Still contains the shiny fabric against the back, the two crystals, the dried rose, and now you can see the mirror. I also put Steve’s Armchair Conductor baton in there. He used to listen to classical music on one of my little boomboxes I took him and direct an imaginary orchestra with that baton in the hospital. Steve was a graduate student in music, a band director, and a conductor.
Beneath that is a picture that was also on the top shelf with Langston Hughes’s “Poem”:
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say
The poem ends,
Soft as it began–
I loved my friend.
Below that is a photo of Riley playing guitar. The poem was true of Steve in 1992. It became true of Riley in 2008.
So now there’s a corner, and on the other wall is the drawing I bought in 2010 from Gilbert Ruiz, a Houston artist, that makes me think of the novel I’ve yet to write about a ghost. The story contains elements of teenage Becky and includes characters inspired by My First Boyfriend and Riley, and borrows from a terrible thing that happened in our little Alabama town. That shadow box also contains strands of love beads from the ones Lynne and I strung all one summer.
Steve’s two 8×10 photos and a photo of Riley playing piano have joined the Family and Friends Gallery in the hall (of Houndstooth Hall).
I think you’re caught up to the redo of the little place where I had that mess of books. Now it’s just my various eReaders and the CD player I use for my playlist when I write. Tidier, right?
Those books moved to the top shelf that used to be all Steve stuff. They join some journals that had been on a tavern table in the dining room, my day planner, the Patti Smith book, my manifestation dude, sitting next to little herbal bags that were also from Steve and from Billie back in the day, and the “Sisters are forever” art given to me by Debby.
Next shelf down are more muses: Dennis Wilson, Beach Boys things, and four of my character dolls.
Bottom shelf are my Beatles things.
You have no idea what a mess those shelves were. Maybe now that my space feels so much clearer and uncluttered, my brain will follow suit and help me write again? When Lynne was here, she sat in this room as I read chapters aloud to her that she hadn’t previously read. She liked them. She said I NEED TO FINISH THE BOOK.
The “Be Positive” coloring and writing journal that Lynne gave me–May of 22?–that I use for coloring and speculating about what I’m writing or should be writing and the inspirations and challenges involved. Today, after I wrote next to the page I’d colored, I closed the book and laughed at that name…be positive. Gotta say what I wrote today in the journal is maybe one of the least positive things I think/feel. The words I almost never say out loud because they would likely be misunderstood or else prompt advice or guidance that I’m not looking for. That’s not my Aries resistance to being directed or told what to do. It’s only that this Aries knows herself–myself–too well to pretend I’m looking for answers from outside when the answers within have been hard won.
