I live in fear of someone stopping by.  My house looks like a crime scene, a place cluttered with telltale evidence of thoughts interrupted and chores half done.  Take the dining room for instance. Every flat surface  is cluttered with piles of writing—first-draft essays scrawled on loose-leaf paper, assorted journals which were begun, misplaced, then begun again, magazines, paperback books, catalogs, receipts, lists, reminders.

A few old pads of unlined paper sit crisscrossed on the floor. They have become the final resting place for inspirational quotes, interesting vocabulary words, and clever turns of phrase that might, one day, be fleshed out and made into something real.  Oddball scraps of paper litter each pile simply because I can’t part with them.  Each scrap preserves a half-formed idea too precious to discard or some frantic scribbling meant to capture someone else’s wisdom:

“Most of us were raised to be ordinary. Extraordinary is something else.”

“The artist’s eye level is the horizon.”

“We are always attracted to the characteristics that we need to foster in ourselves.”

“Lateralization happens when both sides of the brain work together.”

“Look up ‘consubstantial.’ “

Not everything is a scrap.  There are neatly typed copies of mostly-finished work waiting patiently to be three-hole punched and tucked away before the next gust of wind flutters them to the floor.  I say ‘mostly-finished’ because if my work is placed in a binder and I read it a year from now, inevitably I will see that it isn’t my best work so I pull it out and polish it up some more.  Like cleaning, my writing is never done.

And that’s just the dining room.

I think of myself as an old ball of yarn that’s been batted around by a mischievous cat–a ball of yarn that’s been pulled apart and unraveled for so long that the loose end has become impossible to find.  I’d like to tidy up again, but I need that loose end to start. Knowing that it’s somewhere in that mass of loops and knots is one thing; finding it is another.

I should mention that six pages of handwritten notes entitled, “Unclutter Your Life” sit on the very top of the largest pile. (The irony of this is not lost on me.)The obscure jottings are from an Internet lecture by an Organization Guru. They give me hope. I’m thinking that if I type up those notes in an orderly fashion and follow all the advice, maybe—just maybe–I might be able to find that loose end.

I’ll let you know how that all works out.