Hello friends!

Here were are, squarely in July.

I spent most of my holiday weekend—does it count as a “holiday weekend” if a) you’re not working a day job and so not technically on holiday, and b) you don’t actually celebrate? (Unless drinking whiskey while you patch a pair of cutoffs counts as celebrating. Maybe it does.) Anyhoo. I spend most of my weekend happily purging clutter from the tiny house.

A pair of dead earbuds, severed from their cord, which were lovingly nestled in a bird’s nest.

A once-prized pair of pants which had begun bagging at the knees.

An impressive collection of hotel shampoos.

&c.

Ricky was out of town so I felt gloriously uninhibited and this is what I do for fun apparently.

I think I fear clutter because I grew up with it. In my mom’s house, never my dad’s. (My dad used to deposit any personal items left in communal quarters at the bottom of the stairs, to be whisked up into my room pronto. He didn’t want to look at that shit.) 

There’s a teensy bit of a hoarding tendency on my mom’s side of the family, and my stepdad had the gene, too. When he and my mom split for the final time, I helped her clean out one of their houses: a seminal experience. In addition to the boxes and boxes of Ivo’s books, which were shipped to Prague (at his expense, I wonder now?), there were towering stacks of newspapers, umpteen rusted tools, and—this is the thing that really gets me—bowls, little bowls everywhere, bowls full of pocket change and old earplugs and a thousand orphaned keys. So many keys. TO WHERE? A rusty padlock, a house in San Francisco, an apartment sold eight years back?? This is what I’m fighting every time I purge. Lord help me if I ever harbor a bowl of keys.