A Look at the Rat's Nest

I'm calling this blog The Rat's Nest, defying the notion that ours is an empty nest. More, it's filled with the detritus of years of accumulated stuff that never got the attention it deserved, was for so long seen as an impervious block of junk that fit together, making sense only in relationship to other piles of junk. When the kids left that all changed. The piles no longer made sense. Nothing made sense.


But now that they're gone I don't need to keep the giant teddy bear that my father gave my daughter just because it was the ONLY toy he ever gave her. He's gone and now so is she, off to her first year of college. So, so goes the bear. I can clear away her cosmetics, the nail polishes from eighth grade sleepovers, the perfumes, hair sprays and rollers that she'll never use again. I don't need to keep my son's room intact— he's 3000 miles away, living and working in Brooklyn. I can move the Mad Magazines and the how-to-be-a-famous-cartoonist books to the garage and clear the space for an office, my own space, where I'll sit down to write about life... without them.