Do you want to rearrange the furniture?

I peered at the newly carpeted “back room”. I looked at the cluttered shelf that holds our birdhouse collection, at least the part of the collection that isn’t currently attached to the outside of the house holding baby birds and their families. (I don’t have trouble with the birdhouse collection per se, it’s the other crap that has insinuated itself onto the shelf *with* the collection.) I had a pretty quick answer: NO! I want to get rid of the blasted CLUTTER!!! Honestly, the way the furniture in the back room has been for, oh, about the last 10 or 15 years is just about the only way it *works*! I’m not sure why. It just does. Or maybe it’s just that I can’t see past the clutter and dust. I hate to dust. And vacuum. But I would probably do both of those things a heckuva lot more often if I didn’t have to move so much crap, crud, corruption, flotsam, jetsam, and cosmic debris around just to do it. And then move it all *back*.

I’ve been living one of my recurrent dreams this week. Does everybody have recurrent dreams? I have several categories of them. There are the frenetic processing dreams, where my brain forces me to go over and over and over and over ad nauseam whatever it is I am working on at the time. Notes and fingerings for a new piece of music, computer code in whatever flavor, a large Word document, Flash project, bead-weaving pattern, you name it. Then there are the shoreline dreams. The Fin Family Moominbeach folks know what I mean. My shoreline dreams don’t limit themselves to freighters coming into the bay, the shoreline goes through all kinds of bizarre permutations for me, including fire engines and lots of smoke on the morning of September 11, 2001. I kid you not! Prescient? I’m not sure I really wanna know.

And then there are the packing dreams nightmares… I dunno if I’ve been having packing dreams my whole life or not. I know I’ve had them since I began schlepping the beach urchins around. In a typical packing dream nightmare, I’d be sitting on the floor with a diaper bag surrounded by baby clothes, toys, books, and whatever. Madly stuffing all of that cosmic debris into the diaper bag. I would get it all in there and manage to zip the blasted bag up and, yes I am done with this and we can pack our vee-hickle, yay! And then. I’d look around and there’d be a whole bunch more baby-related flotsam and jetsam and cosmic debris. And I would open up the bag again and push all the stuff down and miraculously, there would be enough room to stuff some more junk and paraphernalia down in there. Usually about that time, I would force myself to wake up.

I have been living that dream nightmare all week. Emptying rooms so they can be re-carpeted and rebuilt and… I won’t go any further here. I was futzing around in the back room today actually *dusting*! Hey, because I *could*. I could reach various little collections of knick-knacks without moving a whole bunch of furniture and other junk. And I rediscovered the kokeshi dolls of my baby-hood. Y’all have kokeshi dolls? I do. I have had those kokeshi dolls since whenever it was that my brain could string memories together into more than little flashes of things. They actually came *from* Japan, where my wonderful now 92-year-old aunt (and still kicking, thank you veddy much) taught for a few years after WWII. The big one is the outer shell of a set of nested dolls, you can see where she comes apart. I can’t remember how many were inside of her but I sure remember taking them all apart and putting them back together again about a million times. I don’t know where most of them went but the leeetle wee doll that you can hardly see, on the left, is “Bug”. That’s what I named the inner-most nested doll back in my toddler-hood. Bug doesn’t come apart. The little red kokeshi doll on the right used to have a partner. A blue doll almost like her. I don’t know what happened to the blue kokeshi doll. I do know that I won’t willingly get rid of these, *ever*! Clutter be damned. I guess that is all.

Er, except that maybe if we would get rid of some of the *other* clutter, I would dust and vacuum a bit more often.

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