Confessions of a Clutterbug

No, my house is not cluttered.

I have built a retaining wall

Against both the outside world, and my own internal chaos.

A balanced buffer, a tenuous equilibrium.

Why would I want to tidy?

The things to hand, they tell the story of my life,

And my future plans.

This? Me, months ago, at my bestie’s, on the glass bead torch,

Trying to do an Arabian folded bead – and failing spectacularly.

It was meant to look like ocean waves,

But It kinda looks like the base of a flower,

So I’m going to try to do some other beads to make a rose-like thing.

That? The latest in my squishie collection!

Each flattened penny is a happy memory,

The hunt, the find, the squishhhh – each a captured moment of success.

Why, yes, I am hoarding pennies, why do you ask?

No, I won’t tell you where my stash is, dare you to find it.

Those I got coming back from Cape May,

Where I got this ring made of teal sea glass. I couldn’t resist it.

The one made of uranium sea glass was more expensive.

I got into such cool conversations about glass-

I was wearing a brag necklace, and a sea glass pebble skirt,

One made by bestie’s sister, Cindy, now three years gone.

We tried to bring her granddaughter with us,

But, you know, prom and finals and getting ready to graduate.

She’s getting out of her backwater area, and her crappy parents-

You know the kind.

We took her to her first ocean beach, when she was about seven,

Down to Solomons, describing the fossil beds we drove over.

She got a fossil shark tooth as a reminder of that trip.

Oh, not that huge jar, that was a gift for taking a friend to Venice Beach.

That friend found two before I found one, her first hunt.

At least I’m a good teacher...

Yes, that’s real moonstone. I picked that off a beach up north, years back.

They have a ridge line of pure moonstone right off the coast, the weasels.

That? A native artifact, the grackles left it for me,

We fed them all through a cold spring migration many years ago.

Their descendants still nest in the trees around the house.

Speaking of – yes, that’s an earbud.

The grackles took a dislike to the idiots who came to fix our furnace.

He was told not to wear earbuds on the work site.

Instead of working, he was searching for it in our yard.

We came to help when the job was done, for a freaking hour.

I saw grackles flying away…

And thought, naaaaaw, but… maybe?

It appeared on the edge of the sidewalk after the snow melted,

Right when the grackles returned to tidy their nests.

No, we didn’t miss it in the snow. It was deliberately placed.

I now have a small collection of shiny things from the corvids,

And this takes center place.

That’s one of my Valentine’s presents from about a decade ago.

Hubster either gets me a rose for my rose collection, over there,

Or something erotic, usually jewelry… or something cute.

I loathe the color pink, but this is okay, he’s adorable.

(It’s the only color they had.)

Oh, that? I have seasonal jewelry,

Gotta have my things in fours, you know. Cultural quirk and all that.

I may be a bit behind in changing them; I haven’t worn bracelets recently.

That’s the abacus that hubster had as a kid,

He uses a smaller one to add, and subtract. More accurate than a calculator.

Those paperweights? We made them, hubster and I.

It was part of our thirtieth anniversary trip,

We traveled to Vermont, and had an amazing time.

His is the blue, mine’s the green.

I’m still in my teal phase, many -m-o-n-t-h-s- decades later.

Those were our wedding colors, teal and white.

My wedding quilt’s upstairs.

Double wedding ring,

So hard to find the last fabric print to match the others,

Mom and Grenny and I visiting every fabric shop in the area.

Family friend pieced it, we rolled it, Grenny stitched it,

Everyone in my family adding stitches to it,

Mom bleeding on it, because she never got the knack of quilting.

No, I don’t collect Legos,

But that is our granddaughter’s closer-to-Christmas present,

And we have to keep it away from my parents’ house

Because she’ll go through every drawer and closet looking for the stash.

Little nixnutz.

That’s her work, in her early years.

The one aside of it? My bestie.

She does the gem trees, and her sister frames them.

No, the other sister.

Both were there, with me and hubster, when Cindy died.

See? Chains of memories,

Twined around the mementos I keep with me.