Living room in its orderly state

Living room in transition

Office of a neatnik

Doesn’t everyone have an orchid?

Alex out and about

Hiking at Rossmoor to escape the chaos

“Write your mind!” This exhortation originated with Allen Ginsberg and came to me via one of my favorite poets Frank X Gaspar (Late Rapturous, Night of a Thousand Blossoms). Gaspar speaks of his own need for encouragement, and his realization that Ginsberg was right – trust what’s in your mind and heart and set it down.

Filling my mind – and heart – these days:  Missing curtain rods, a bathtub drain that won’t close, Marlowe’s sharp nails desperately in need of a trim, a garage full of boxes, forwarded mail. My move from Oakland to Walnut Creek like an echo in a fun house tunnel – it just keeps going – driving me mad!

In 1978 a psychic told me that moving cross-country from Worthington, Minnesota to Nevada City, California was akin to taking a file drawer full of folders and dumping them out on the floor. Scraps of my old life flung about in a messy heap. That time, I was joining my life with a man’s as well. A risky merger. But that was four decades ago; let’s hope I’ve learned a thing or two.

Back then, it took years to sort out those emptied file folders. This time, I pray it’s a matter of months.

My beloved Alex, with whom I’m now cohabiting, moves four boxes at a time, crammed with dust-covered household items, not taped shut, in the back of his Prius V. He painstakingly disassembles bookshelves – seven of them, each six-feet tall – and then reassembles them in our new place, screws taped to the shelves, hauling them out of the car and stacking the orphaned shelves in our new living room. To make room for the bookshelves, he empties the contents of his home office, spilling over the tops of boxes, bursting from plastic shopping bags, and puts those in the living room as well. From Friday afternoon until Sunday night, I walk by, breath held, eyes averted, heart pounding, until he moves everything back and closes his office door.

My seventh grade Civics teacher, Mr. Healey, wrote, “To the most disunorganized person I know…” Finally, I fully appreciate the humor and insight of those words scrawled in blue ballpoint in a margin of my yearbook.

Disorder breeds panic in my inner child. She thinks she’s back in a Pennsylvania farm house in a maelstrom of emotional chaos. Mr. Healey saw that my organization was a reaction, my neatness a coping mechanism. If I can create order and beauty, I can help that little girl feel safe.

Like any creative process, moving requires me to tolerate endless messes. To set up a new home, the old one must be disassembled, boxed up, loaded into a truck (or the back of a station wagon), transported to the new location, unboxed, dusted, arranged, and then rearranged.

I couldn’t bear any of this without help: practical, psychological, and spiritual! Endless gratitude to Alex for his patience and good humor – and even his grumpy withdrawals. It brings me face to face with old bruises and motivates me to find a way through them. Tough stuff. But so valuable.

And to my many helpers – Brittni, Camilla, Gayle Grace – women who know how to organize, soothe, massage things into place. Mr. Healey would have written in their yearbooks too!

Bit by bit, we’re building a shared space. Alex has his office. I have mine. The cat has wild turkeys and deer to watch through the windows. We can hang out on the patio, or one of Rossmoor’s pools, or endless green spaces when the indoors is too overwhelming. With each book and fork, each dish towel and pot-holder – with every decision – a new life is being born.

As a reader once wrote to me, “Life is messy.” Yes. And glorious.

Photo credit: <a href=”https://visualhunt.com/author/c28d3a”>hernanpba</a> on <a href=”https://visualhunt.com/re/e0e86f”>Visual Hunt</a> / <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”> CC BY-SA</a>