Hoarder in the Court

Doesn’t this look like a flower pot for zinnias?

What a crew. They really did open up space in my brain so that now I might walk through and really create. The time has come to be rid of what has not been used, to make the gathering easier, to create a place where I feel at ease and my ease is enough to change everybody around me.

Sometimes I think that change has to come in big ways, with an entire organization, with an entire city. Sometimes change comes when Mae yells at me through the window screen but I’m not sure if she’s yelling or if I’m having audible hallucinations because of the noise of the chainsaw.

As an aside, I used to hop around atop limbs and brush and smash these into the bed of a truck the way Dan did on Needle Street today. I used to could climb to the tops of trees and never once thought of the possibility of losing balance. 

It’s time to heal this knee and this ankle so that I might climb again. In the clearing of this pace there is much that remains to be moved, to be burnt, to be maintained in the morning before the sun rises.

Back to Miss Mae. What she said, ever so softly, “Would you like it if somebody came and put a bunch of sticks and weeds in the street in front of your house?”

“I would not,” I said. “I should have been more thoughtful,” I said. I meant both of these. I told her that I would get everything out this afternoon.

I did not tell her that I was already planning to do this because I had the stellar crew of Antball working in the yard. 

She asked, “What’s that there? An orange?”

I told her I thought it was a satsuma, that somebody gave it to me. “Do you eat guava?”

She said, “I’m from California. I eat all kinds of things people round here don’t eat.” She told me the space was looking better. She said, “We keep our yard cut.”

I didn’t say, “I know. The guy does it threw old door frame and other boards into my lot.”

It’s nice to have nice things. I’m a lucky man to be able to own property in an area that continues to become more and more valuable. I wonder about tiny houses that might run on solar. I have enough space now  to see the vision of this. I have enough space to move around and move some things out.

This is the gift that comes with letting help help you. Still I wonder why it is still so much easier for me to give help than to ask. Seems there’s something inside, the same something that had me standing high atop a tree with a chainsaw just two years ago.

Me though. Now, what I should be doing are late morning yoga classes and stretches in the sauna and perhaps a mow of this spot and the spot on Needle Street. 

God gave me this space to enjoy, not to fret and worry and always be thinking about what needs to change. 

I am lucky to have friends who came in and worked so hard, who gave me back my space. At one point Angie said, “You have to promise you can’t bring anything else in here. At least for a year.”

It felt like one of those episodes of Hoarders where the family comes and pulls out envelopes that Aunt Flo says she has to keep because this one had the stamp of a rare elephant and this one was where her cousin wrote her name upside down.

With me there was always the idea that this, whatever this is, will become that, and still I drive and I see this after this after this and my brain jumps to that, that, that.

Perhaps this is the mark of an artist. Perhaps this is the mark of a madman. Perhaps this is the mark of a mind not meant to hold so many patterns and figures and equations. Perhaps this is the mark of a man so connected to nature that waste becomes my responsibility.

So I guess all that is left for this brain, for this space that has become a bit clearer is this, from now until Tuesday, waste away.