One of my resolutions this year, and sooner rather than later, is to find my desk. My desk hasn’t gone anywhere, but in the past couple of years with the publication of my novel, Alabaster Houses, and all the subsequent non-writing activities required to publicize it, I have gotten surprisingly little work done on my current novel, and absolutely none of it at my desk. At the same time, our empty nest has undergone a population explosion. Lots of returning, reproducing, and relocating has been going on here. As more and more of our household items have had to be moved, sifted through, re-designated, or given away with each new arrival and departure, the loft that was once my office has become a purgatory for displaced belongings.

Recently I’m feeling the yearn for routine again, coffee in the same place at the same time, the slow slog, the tedious work of writing a novel. It’s time to sit my ass down on a hard plank of a chair, plunk out black letters onto a white page for several hours at a time and intermittently stare into space. That sort of work can only get done at my desk. Time to find it.

At first my desk remained visible. Shipments of books arrived and were placed on top of piles of research and binders with early drafts and more book shipments and boxes of promotional materials. I spent some time traveling, and my desk became a dumping station, shrouded under piles of paper and books and boxes that may or may not have contained things I should or should not have been paying attention to. Then it became the mere backdrop to the pile of things I was storing in front of it. Later, that portion of the room where my desk had first been accessible, then merely visible, then vaguely locatable became the forgotten area behind the space that I could no longer get to where I had stored some things that I no longer remembered if I did or did not need, because they were barricaded by the stack of things that I definitely needed but had no current room for anywhere else in our house.

So what do I find on the way to finding my desk? Lots of outgrown baby equipment. Since the publication of my novel, my grandson has fast forwarded from a preemie to an infant to a toddler. He has shed just about as much molded plastic, rubber, and enamel coated metal as he’s shed skin cells. We have baby-sized containerization technology that swings, rocks, bounces, rolls, sings, whirls, blinks, whizzes and sighs.

I find old, unopened bills. The thing about bills is, you never get sent just one. Fail to pay it, and new ones arrive punctually every month. I open this one and find a twenty month old invoice for something I must have eventually paid, since I’m not in jail, but who can remember these things?

I find lists made to myself for things I was supposed to do that might or might not have gotten done. I find books I meant to read but haven’t, articles I meant to read but haven’t, clothes, whole wardrobes in varying sizes and conditions, folded, bagged and ready to pass on. I find boxes of beads, threads, craft books, my Bedazzler with scraps of studded, beaded, and dazzled fabrics waiting to take shape. I find a stack of picture frames in advancing stages of disrepair. I find an endless supply of things I always need but can never find- pens, pencils, notepaper, binders, folders, paper clips, packs of light bulbs, two cans of Endust, several random, unmated book ends, a box full of colored coat hangers. I spy an art easel slumped in the corner, crates full of old textbooks, school handouts, and lesson plans.

I find a cat. To be honest, I recognize this cat; it belongs to us, but who knows how long it has been hiding in this particular box waiting for me to shift the lid a little. It springs out with a screech from the middle of a pile.

I find a crate full of old Marine Corps cammies and dress shirts. A box of model cars, a plastic crate labeled “Vital- Do Not Throw Out!!!” full of my married daughter’s old bank statements, college tuition statements, employment pay stubs and high school theater Playbills. A box of old cds, letters from various girls, foreign coins, ticket stubs, photographs, a belt buckle, a broken watch band, an incredibly expensive school ring still in the box, some individual, unmatched socks and one old pair of graying briefs.

These are the vestiges of the life that has been waged around this space, the peripheral and sloughed off artifacts of heroic efforts, daily grinds, unexpected upheavals, well deserved advances, and the simple but unstoppable passage of time. My loft office, perhaps because of its availability or disuse, perhaps because of its proximity to the entrances and exits in our home, has become a repository of clutter, but clutter that, on closer inspection, as all clutter inevitably does, tells a story.

I am struck by how easily our lives have continued and prospered without any of these things, stored, lost, or forgotten as they have been over the years. Money has been spent replacing some of these things. I am chastened by that. But most of what lies here signifies the passage of a stage of life, a time when my children were younger, more vulnerable, when I had more time to pursue artistic hobbies, a time when I labored at something other than my writing, a time when I labored at my writing, and now, a time when the success of my labors has moved me on once again.

I wonder if people who are relentlessly orderly, compulsively organized, have opportunities to take stock of their lives in such massive, physical chunks. Although the accumulation of disorder on such a large scale leaves me longing for some personal improvement, this is the way my life is lived- in a rhythm of ebbs and surges, and I find value in both seasons.

I also find my desk. A new season about to begin.