I Am This Woman

This is the time of year - early fall - when everything is scheduled on top of everything else on the weekends. Festivals, fairs, exhibits, workshops. Garage sales are in full swing, grocery stores are bursting with gorgeous local produce, pick your own pumpkin patches are crowded.

At home, I have a backlog of little projects that demand my attention, in addition to the usual routine work and class commitments. The holidays approach and I always get a bit ambitious with my plans.

But in a perfect world, I would have time for the following To-Do’s today:

make spice nut muffins

make pom-pom spiders

make a glow-in-the-dark ghost mobile (maybe with spiders)

pick our own pumpkin (and carve it!)

hit a few garage sales for some old sweaters in the ongoing old sweater project

take a load of books and magazines to sell back to Half-Price Books

sand down the play kitchen and see if it can be stained or needs painting

finish the painting started in class yesterday (and left in a horrible state of un-doneness)

sew on the patchwork quilt

finish the alphabet pocket thingey

clean my bedroom (so I can watch movies and knit)

clean out the car

Etc. Etc.

And of course, everyone knows that I might get stuck doing laundry, cleaning the cabinet of odd things in the kitchen (because it’s getting too odd in there), and schlepping the kid and dog around to the park for some of that nice fall-ish air.

But it’s ok. It’s nice to be busy like this. This kind of busy invigorates and relaxes. The hard busy stuff (articles to be written, books to be read, books to be drafted and pitched and written, contacts to make, networks to be networked)… that can all wait for Monday.

A while back, I wrote that creativity is messy, in that there is not a linear path from inspiration all the way to execution. Sometimes there are messes to make to get to the good stuff, sometimes it is in cleaning up the mess that one discovers the nugget.

Today and yesterday, I have been getting dirty. Messy AND dirty. How? I’m out in the garage sorting through string, wire, tools, rusty things, dusty things, pots of paint, tubes of glue, rolls of tape, and tangles of tangly things. And it’s glorious.

Ah ha, this tool! this is what my father used to mark holes for drilling! Ah, this is the old drill, requiring NO power cord. This is the screwdriver set with the wooden handles that he made, from reclaimed doweling and found screwdrivers when the house next door was built and the workers left a trash pile.

What in the hell is this tool? it’s something for the car because it’s greasy. Black and greasy.

Oh cool, another clothespin and a rubber band. Perfect for making a tiny clamp for glue drying.

You can bet that the cleaned up workbench in the corner was quickly filled with new projects and piles of things to sort out and weed through.

Yes, it does my heart good to simply clean and sort this mess, get my hands dirty, and make plans for future projects. This is part of my grief work, I suppose, reclaiming the happy hundreds, even thousands of hours I spent in the garage with my father and brothers.

I can’t wait for TigerWhelp to come home.