The Dark Side of Organizing

The very first post I wrote for this blog outlined the issues my Third Third had raised. The second post was about de-cluttering, and included eight thoughts on de-cluttering. Here I am years later, and all those are still big issues.

In the first blog, I asked, “Why is this Third Third such a big deal?” I gave ten answers, but the first one began, “It’s colored by mortality.” So now, get ready for a pandemic-influenced, dark-outside, morbid blog.

This is how my Third Third began: with organizing! I loved organizing/de-cluttering! It meant things that were strewn all over the place found their preferred location in my now-orderly universe. That new place was more attractive, aesthetically pleasing, neat, accessible, tidy. So, for instance, my hundreds of Anchorage Daily News columns found their way into my handmade books. Books were donated and only favorites held prime spots on the bookshelves. Videos became DVDs.

Organizing made my present and future more pleasant, cleansed of clutter.

It’s not that organizing itself was always smooth and pleasant. Every project suffered from setbacks and lost momentum, but when they were finished, it was terrific!

But lately, some other feeling appeared. After finishing the glorious collection of family recipes in my exquisite, artful, photo recipe book, friends called it a “legacy.”

How lovely! In that first blog, the fifth point in “Why is this Third Third such a big deal” was “What legacy do I leave behind?” Wow, now I had a legacy!

One I’d leave behind. After I was dead. (Cue the dark and the pandemic.)

Then I tackled the photo albatross: I culled, I tossed, I labeled, I mounted in a photo album for easy viewing. I actually finished it! Victory! … Not really. It seems I went from De-cluttering Reason #1 (“You have to toss some of your old life to make room for a new life.”) to #8 (Your kids don’t want your shit.) In other words, my organizing stopped feeling like I was making a new life, but rather packing up my old life for posterity.

My sister says, “Yeah, but as you went through the photos, you were reminded of each fun time and enjoyed them all over again.” Yes, all those fun times in the past.

Here’s another example: Tim and I have been meeting with a financial counselor, as we have every now and then over the years. Previous visits were like: Is this the best way to save? What can we do now so we can REALLY do something big next year or in two years? And how big can it be? Now, our financial plan has this big word in it: Estate. We’re not just looking at bank accounts or mutual funds; we’re looking at our estate.

Estates are for dead people.

Oh, I am getting very morbid. Instead of feeling like every paper I put in its proper file is clearing my desk, I feel like it’s making it easier for my survivors to find.

My siblings, who have no children, have different reactions. My sisters worry about where it will go; my brother happily says, “In the trash.” “But who will sort through it? Who will handle it?” the sisters ask. “No sorting. Whoever gets the house just throws it all out.” And he sweeps his hand across the Zoom screen.

Just today, my friend Chris asked, “What if all your photos, all your saved stuff, just vaporized? Isn’t it just … stuff?” She’s right. My files of community projects, places we’ve visited, high school yearbooks, appliance warranties – those can all vaporize.

But I have a different feeling about my writing. My mother used to write stories – she called her collection “Chicken Every Friday.” I read them once as a teenager, and they were really good. But they’re gone. Just gone. I would have liked to sit with her innermost thoughts. I would have liked to remember her that way.

So every time I encounter another piece of my writing, I don’t think happy organizing, clear-the-clutter, how-clean-how-tidy thoughts. I think of being remembered. Isn’t that what we’d all like, to be remembered well? Isn’t that a part of our Third Thirds experience?

In the dark of Covid winter, some thoughts are too bleak to entertain. But in the dark of Covid winter, some thoughts just sit and sit. That’s why this post has been so long in coming. I gave you a warning sign!

(I have heard that opening the door at midnight is supposed to help put 2020 to bed. And for extra insurance, I’ve Googled how to make a hot toddy to toast the arrival of 2021.)

Cause for Celebration

I was going to celebrate when I reached 365 posts, and I’m only at 302.

But…

I have news.

“Our Third Thirds” has received a First Place Award from the National Federation of Press Women. And because I won that, I get to put this on my website.

Now I just have to figure out where it should go and how to get it in there.

A Third Third technological challenge. Stay tuned.

And because good news comes in batches, I have more. My one children’s story – Hanukkah in Alaska – the story that lives a charmed life and provides me with continuing good news out of the blue – has done it again: PJ Library has picked it up AGAIN for distribution to children as their November book-of-the-month!

For a whopping 31,300 copies for both the U.S. and the U.K.!

This came with an interesting request: I had to make some changes to include the U.K. audience. For some little cross-cultural tidbits, here they are:

• “shoveled driveways and paths,” had to be changed to “cleared driveways and paths.” A friend said that’s because in England, they use spades, not shovels.


• The little girl’s “thick, baggy pants and a sweatshirt” had to become her “thick, baggy sweatpants and a sweatshirt.” That one stumped me until another friend said that “pants” in England are “underpants.”


• “Mom” became “my mother” because English mothers are “Mums.”


• And, of course, “color” wouldn’t work in a “colourful” world, so it’s just gone.

But you can still color me pleased!

Tab Hunter -- the Corrected Memory

Uh, oh. My little Tab Hunter post has opened up a can of worms. I could put it all down to a memory problem, but ... it’s a bigger story than that.

It all started with Tab Hunter dying and my thinking of “My Future World,” the novel I wrote about our married life together. That reminded me of The Little White Closet, the chest of drawers that held all my stories and creative ventures when I was little. Unfortunately, when I was away at college, my stuff disappeared, replaced by my mother’s financial folders. Gone was the novel. That part of the story you’ve heard.

In order to paint The Little White Closet for the blog, I needed to remember the colors of the drawers. So I put the question out on the sibling email. My sister, Allison, and I shared the dresser. We emailed back and forth with images of the drawer layout, trying to remember, but ultimately I had to guess at the color scheme. We emailed about the bedroom layout, the stuffed animals we each had on our beds, the old, clunky TV. It was a real trip down memory lane.

And then Allison wrote this:

I was just looking for that email again so I typed in “Tab Hunter” and I just found an old email of ours from 2014 where you, Barbara, wrote about finding your novel about marrying him.

Pause for major mental readjustment. I’d found it?

Pause for major hunt through boxes in the downstairs closet and … the discovery of “My Future World.” Or the re-discovery, as the facts show: on June 8, 2014, I sent an email to the siblings announcing the discovery of the novel. It’s there, in my sent mail. I even mention my author’s note:

That was 2014. It is now 2018. Where did that memory cell go?

And where did all the false memories come from? Why, for instance, was I positive that Tab and I had 26 children, named alphabetically? The real novel: “You all know he was a bachelor but he finally married a young girl by the name of Barbara Brown. Mrs. Hunter was an actress and a very fine mother of a family of 12 boys.” 12, not 26. And it was not written on a Big Chief pad.

Especially shocking to me were the number of pets: six dogs, five cats, and a bird named Twinkles. In real life, I am not a dog person, not a cat person; I guess Barbara Hunter was. But even she had her limits. Chapter 2: Worse than an Elephant. The boys got a duck and named him Blabby. He jumped on beds, tore pants, and ate greens. He was given away to Uncle Larry and Aunt Dot, who also lived in Hollywood, along with Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Eric.

Yes, Allison was still in New Hampshire, but in Chapter 4, the whole family visited her:

So it wasn’t exactly banishment. Even though the Hunters lived at 62 Maple Avenue, Hollywood, California, they could visit Aunt Allison on a weekend. On the way home, they stopped off in Alabama (Alabama?!?) to visit Barbara’s father.

All siblings accounted for, Dad accounted for (in Alabama?!?), but where is Mom?

Uh, oh.

In college, I discovered The Little White Closet was emptied of all my childhood writings. I blamed my mother. Despite her denials, I “mentioned” her transgression often. Maybe every trip home.

1989: I pack and mail a box of Long Island things to Anchorage. The address label is in my handwriting.
2014: I discover the box with my novel inside it.
2016: At my mother’s funeral, I again mentioned how she’d tossed my writings.
a few days ago: I wrote a blog post and clearly insinuated that my mother had thrown them out.

I absolutely, positively believed my mother had thrown out my stuff despite all the evidence to the contrary. Shit.

Today, I have an announcement: My mother did not throw my stories away. Tab Hunter died without seeing my novel, and my mother died before I could ever acknowledge she hadn’t thrown it away.

Did my mother feel as wronged as I had?

My First Crush: Tab Hunter

Tab Hunter died. Proof that I’m in my Third Third … and that Tab Hunter was in his Eighth Eight. (My husband says I have to provide a link so people will know who on earth Tab Hunter is.)

Tab Hunter was my first crush. Sunday nights were Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, followed by Shirley Temple’s Storybook, followed by The Tab Hunter Show. I remember nothing of the show except that I fell in love with Tab Hunter. I must have remembered that it took place in California because …

I wrote a novel about growing up, marrying Tab Hunter, and living in California. It was called My Future World. It was very long – it filled an entire Big Chief tablet of ruled paper. I showed it to my favorite teacher, Miss MacNally. She was young and fashionable, and she followed on Miss Crisswell and Miss Strangmeyer, who were old and fuddy-duddyish and had eyeglasses on chains around their necks.

Only yesterday did I realize that if I showed it to Miss MacNally, I was in third grade and I was seven years old! I remember that because Miss MacNally divulged my secret: she showed my novel to the school psychologists. I came home from school and there were two men in suits talking with my mother in the living room (the room NO ONE ever occupied). They wanted to put me in fourth grade. They wanted to take me away from my beautiful, attentive, wonderful Miss MacNally. I refused. It worked; I was a pretty adamant seven-year-old.

Do you ever look back on things you did when you were younger and you simply cannot believe you could do them? In cleaning out the family attic, my siblings and I were constantly flabbergasted over science projects and term papers we’d come across. Who did this?!? I did?!? And not only because I can’t remember, but because I can’t remember being that capable.

Anyhow, Tab Hunter and I had 26 children, all named alphabetically. I got their names from the big, fat, red book on the bookshelf. It had something to do with parenting, but the back was an appendix of baby names and their meanings. That’s where I found out that Barbara meant “pirate, barbarian.” That must be where the adamant seven-year-old came from.

The only other thing I remember is that I lived in California with Tab. So did my brother and baby sister. My middle sister, Allison, lived in New Hampshire.

Notice that, did you? Allison, with whom I shared a bedroom and slept not three feet away from every night for 15 years (well, since I was seven, that would have been only five years by then) was exiled across the country. I know I specifically picked New Hampshire because it was FAR AWAY.

I love Allison. I miss that she now lives so far away in Berlin. But I guess in addition to tormenting her when we were little, I also exiled her. I was the older sister after all.

I remember coming across another story I’d written. A non-fiction one. Mom asks me to do the dishes. I say, “It’s not my turn. I did them last night. Why don’t you ask Allison to do it?” “Oh, you know,” my mother answers. “She washes them in cold water.”

So for that crime, she was banished to New Hampshire.

I have a few of the stories I’d written. I called them “Golden Books” and made them into booklets.

But the novels? They’re gone. I kept them in the chest of drawers; our mother had painted each drawer a different color. The right side was a cabinet, The Little White Closet. That’s where my stories sat even when the dresser was moved to the basement.

One day, my mother, who was a witty and wonderful and unpublished writer, shared that she had kept her stories hidden under a cushion on a sofa in her parents’ basement. She came home from school one day to discover that her parents had sold the sofa. She couldn’t get them back. Hearing that, I was devastated for her. Devastated.

Years later, I came back from college to discover that The Little White Closet had been emptied and was now filled with folders labeled, “Financial Papers.” My mother insisted, “I never throw anything away!” but my life with Tab Hunter vaporized. I never even told him about our future life together.

And now Tab Hunter is dead.

A Royal Scandal

Looking at the world doesn’t take too much consciousness. You look, you see, you move on to some other view. Unless it’s spectacular or very detailed or you have some other reason to inspect it. Maybe you’re looking for a splinter in your toe.

I don’t look at my clothes too closely unless I’m looking for a stain. I don’t look at my dishes unless I’m checking if the dishwasher cleaned them okay. I look at the clock, but I don’t examine the clock. I barely notice the clock.

Have you looked at a deck of cards lately?

Last month’s challenge for my Bricolage group was “playing cards.” I was going to turn rectangular rocks into playing cards, and I did.

But first I had to copy from a playing card. I pulled out the box I keep the decks of cards in. Wow, I had no idea how many I’d thrown in over time! My family used to play Spit, and each person needed their own identifiable deck so the played cards could be counted. Back then, the airlines used to give out decks during flights. I had 21 decks of cards, and that didn’t even count the Go Fish and Old Maid decks! I have Northwest Orient, Delta, Alaska, United, and Hawaiian Airlines decks. I have Carnival Cruise, FedEx, and British Air, too. I even have Peter Dunlap-Shohl’s White House of Cards and Idaho Authors (and no idea where that last came from).

Yes, I’m decluttering. Cannibalizing, too.

I pulled out the face cards, the Jack, the Queen, and the Kings. This time, in order to paint them, I had to examine them. If you’re a regular old face card, you are bored to tears if not clinically depressed. Your face is SO SAD. Your clothes are bright and colorful, but your eyebrows are sad and there are bags under your eyes. Your eyes are … blank.

But I was looking closely, and that’s when I saw that a Jack isn’t a Jack isn’t a Jack. Two of them have mustaches, and two don’t! Jack of Hearts is holding a feather, and Jack of Spades is holding some sort of wand (or scepter or rattle). And they’re not looking in the same direction: Jack of Hearts looks hard right, Jack of Spades looks hard left, and the two others sort of lean to the sides.

Now for the big discovery: all the queens look to the right except the Queen of Spades. She looks left. Her husband, the King of Spades looks left, too. So they can never look at each other! Meanwhile, the King of Diamonds can only look hard right, so he and his queen can never look at each other, either.

The only queen’s eyes the King of Diamonds can look into are in the face of the Queen of Spades.

Do you see the scandal brewing?

The King of Diamonds is the only king extending his hand. Is he reaching for the Queen of Spades???

There’s trouble in the royal court! (And all this boldface type shows just how excited I got.)

Now, while all the royalty look the same from deck to deck, the jokers are entirely different. Some are clowns, and some are harlequins. Some are in disguise, some are on bicycles, and one is an Asian juggler. All these jokers, and the royals still look so exceedingly glum.

There’s a story there, and I couldn’t resist telling it. I made it into a book.

Things just get more interesting when they’re noticed. All sorts of things.

Do you know which king is the only one without a mustache?

Spelling and Grammar and Punctuation – Oh, my!

It started when I was very young. Sometime during dinner, someone would make a grammatical error in speaking, and it was corrected. My mother would then say, “Speak good English, and good English will speak for you.” It always happened this way – without exception.

My mother was full of proverbs, but the grammar one was about creating a first impression, putting forward our best selves. It stuck. Four siblings continue to monitor the grammar (and punctuation) of the world. By monitor, I do NOT mean correcting people! I mean quietly noting the offending tense or case or number disagreement and letting its disturbance pass through our systems.

If we’re occupying the role of editor, yes, we make the correction. If something is being published, it needs to be correct. And that’s probably how grammarians find each other. Maybe you’re in charge of editing a document and you make a change. Someone speaks up and says, “I was debating whether it would fall into the objective or subjective case, but …,” and you glow all over because you’ve found a kindred spirit.

Abbe and I found each other because we both insert the comma in our emails: “Hi, Abbe.” After a while, you start passing grammar questions back and forth to each other. Eventually one of the kindred spirits sent me this video, Vigilante Copy Editor. This is the story of a sculpture garden with placards describing the art – but the placards have lots of grammar mistakes. A rogue grammarian corrected them with a Sharpie. Was he or she being an asshole … or someone restoring the dignity of the art after the poor wording on the descriptive placards?

I walked by a white board in an elementary school with the science word of the day: “spongue.” It killed me. Children would learn the wrong spelling! So I crept up and secretly erased the offending “u.”

We former philosophy students enjoy exploring the narrow boundaries between behaviors: what’s acceptable? What’s reprehensible? Grammar problem as moral issue.

A while back, I discovered a whole new literary genre: humorous grammar and punctuation books by copy editors. Eats, Shoots & Leaves was my first, but then I loved Between You and Me. Now I’m reading Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk. Sometimes I laugh out loud. Sometimes I cringe because I’ve discovered an inadvertent mistake I’d been making. (A real grammar nutcase enjoys a cringe as much as a laugh.) And now I’ve discovered that there are wars among “descriptivists” who say grammar is what people say, “prescriptivists” who say grammar has rules, and assorted “purists,” “sticklers,” and “bullies.”

So there I was, writing my blog post about Stealth De-cluttering. Right there in the third sentence, I faced a grammar dilemma:

“I tried to find the owner, waited for him or her to call, but they never did.”

Oh, the problem! Owner is singular, so if I’m going to be gender-neutral, I have to say “him or her.” But two “him or hers” in a row?!? “I tried to find the owner, waited for him or her to call, but he or she never did.” That’s a mess!

I took the high risk alternative: I opted for the “singular they.” Since English doesn’t have a gender-neutral singular pronoun, I’d heard talk of this “singular they.” I debated including an asterisk so my vigilant grammarian friends would know I wasn’t making a stupid error in number agreement, but I thought that would just call attention to it.

Minutes later – minutes later! – Abbe sent me this: “The singular ‘they’ has been declared Word of the Year.” Immediately, I went back online and added my asterisk.

Meanwhile, the family grammarians have weighed in. My brother pointed out that I’d just needed some more thinking ahead to steer clear of the difficult words: “waited for him or her to call, but no one ever did.” Yes, yes, yes! That would have done it!

I could go back, delete the asterisk, change the wording, fix the whole mess. But where would the story be in that? The story of dilemma and conflict, decision-making and revelation – the grit of a good grammar saga.

Out of the blue...

Every now and then, good luck just happens. Here I was, sweating over a particularly difficult blog post, trying to figure out my own complicated thoughts and put them down in uncomplicated words. Seeing hours go by, fretting over all the hours, beating myself up for taking all those hours.

And then, good news happened right out of the blue.

Way back in 1996, the children’s book author Eric Kimmel visited Anchorage, and I volunteered to show him Alaska. Martin Buser had offered to give him a dog sled ride, and I drove Eric out to the dog lot. In the car, we got to talking, becoming friends, and Eric said, “I’ve got an anthology I’m editing about Hanukkah. How about giving me a story about Hanukkah in Alaska.”

So I did. And he included it in A Hanukkah Treasury. And the story lived happily ever after.

And then, out of the blue, in 2012, I heard from Henry Holt, the publishers. They’d received an order for 10,000 copies of “Hanukkah in Alaska” for the PJ Library’s December 2013 book of the month. But it wasn’t a book … yet; could they make it a book?

So the publishing adventure began. There was only one moment of horror: when I realized the illustrator had turned the first person narrator into a little boy. She was a girl – had to be a girl! It was after all Sophie’s swing, Sophie’s moose, Sophie’s story. Crisis averted, the little girl became the hero of Hanukkah in Alaska, the book! And the book lived happily ever after.

In 2014, Storyline asked permission for an actor to read the book for video. That sounded good. Time passed, I forgot about it.

Then, just yesterday, out of the blue, came the word that the video was done, with Molly Ephraim reading it. It’s beautiful! Take a look yourself at Hanukkah in Alaska, the SAG Foundation video. And I guess the video will live happily ever after, too.

Saved from a difficult post, right out of the blue! That story is my lucky charm.

A year's worth of posts

If this were my old newspaper column, a whole year would have already gone by – 52 weeks’ worth. Instead, it’s only been 2½ months. That’s some crazy pace. So I’m going to consider this a milestone and think about what the blog does for me.

When I started this blog, I was pretty depressed. This Third Third – and my expectations for it – was eluding me. I was floundering with no end in sight. I was beating myself up for lacking discipline, wasting time, being valueless. And I was bombarding everyone my age with “and what are you doing in your Third Third?” I was a demon at my college reunion and a one-question fanatic in my social life.

Somewhere in my vast stretch of time-wasting, I read Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh. I read the book, which developed from her blog, which is mostly pictures but also text. It’s truly wonderful, and it gave me Ideas (so it wasn’t a waste of time after all).

I don’t like reading blocks of text on the computer so I thought I’d add my doodles, too. And then, because it helped me to clarify my thoughts when I put them down – those ten things on the list in Identity Crisis #314 – I felt better.

And when I did it the next day, I felt better again. I was being creative! By the next day, I felt disciplined. And when people told me they liked it, I felt valued. When I tried drawing something difficult, capturing something just so, I felt like I was stretching myself. And when I craft a story, I have to think very hard about how to develop it, how to construct a beginning, middle, and end. I like thinking hard.

Wow, just one thing – this blog – and it could solve a whole lot of my dilemmas. And the ones it didn’t? Those were the ones friends and readers weighed in on and helped the discussion along. Relocation anyone?

Last week, probably because of the latest round of mother-care issues, I was horribly anxious. So anxious I couldn’t quiet the frantic ramblings in my head. At one point, I felt like running screaming into the street. My whole self vibrated, and I couldn’t write. So then I decided I must be “empty.” I’d used all my good ideas up. How embarrassing to announce in my blog that I’d run dry, good-bye. Third Third fizzled.

Mostly, I think I’m a glass-half-empty sort of person. When it’s not empty, it’s so-full-and-isn’t-it-so-interesting-how-that-is-and-why-is-that-the-case-because-there-are-so-many-glasses-in-the-world-and-so-many-different-things-to-fill-them-with. You get the picture. In my often black-and-white world, a glass half-empty – glasses not overflowing – might as well be completely empty. And curiosity is both the cure for a bad mood and the symptom of a good one.

Wise people would say this is a case for moderation. I’m guessing other people may have learned this by their Third Thirds. I’m slow.

But this I know: When I finally sat down and wrote this week, I felt better. Cured even. Some people do it with exercise, some people play the piano. I’m going to sit right here and tell a story about it.

This post is R-rated

I teach a writing class for OLÉ (Opportunities for Lifelong Education). I titled it “Dangerous Writing,” but on the first day of class, I discovered the title had scared a bunch of folks. Brave souls, they still registered, and we’ve been having a lot of fun.

So one of the assignments was “There are two people in a room who hate each other. Demonstrate that fact in writing without using dialogue or any physical violence.”

Wow, everyone was so creative. We had siblings at their mother’s funeral, roommates (one messy, one neat), a husband accosted by an overbearing, talkative person. Rivals at a 51st reunion. In another, two women were delighted to find each other at a social event, but when their husbands joined them, it was obvious there was bad blood there.

We had tension, passive aggressive behaviors, averted eyes. We had reddened faces, tightened jaws, escapes to an exit. It was a real treat.

The class is mostly retired women and John. I’d guess the ages were 50+ into the 70s. After everyone reads, we all point out what made it real for us, what parts resonated and made the picture vivid. Then it was John’s turn.

His story was an affair gone bad. She’s pretending she doesn’t notice him in a crowded room. He’s shuddering and trying to find an exit; he’ll come back later to get his coat. “She turned and walked slowly toward the coat room, smiling and chatting with people along the way, but moving inexorably toward her destination, her escape. She felt moist, not in a good way. Clammy, nauseated.”

I like the scene. So does the class. “But John,” I say, “I don’t think ‘moist’ is the right word. People aren’t moist; sponges are moist. Clammy is the right word.”

The women – the older women, the class full of women – think ‘moist’ is just right. It has to be ‘moist.’ She’s moist. They stare at me. I stare at them. John attempts to clarify: “But not in a good way.” What does that have to do with it? Quite a few white heads bob at me. “No, ‘moist’ is the right word.”

“Ohhhhh,” I stammer, “moist down there moist???” Yes, that’s exactly what they mean. It’s the real point of the scene. John, whose misfortune it is to be the only man in the room with women who know exactly what he meant, is so beet-red he’s glowing.

“It’s from a Leonard Cohen song,” he says. “‘...and the ladies go moist, and the judge has no choice....’”

This class knows how to do their Third Thirds! The only one who flustered in the face of “danger” was me. So I felt compelled to tell a story; when would I ever get a lead-in like this?

Do you remember the movie The Big Easy? Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin have the steamiest, most incredibly sizzling scene together. Shortly after it came out, my sister and I were visiting my mother on Long Island, and the subject of the movie came up. My sister lives in Berlin and hadn’t seen it yet. I told her about that sexy scene. My mother added, “Oh, Allison, that scene just lubricated my vagina.”

The class roared and exclaimed, “Your mother said that?!” Hey, hadn’t they just taught me about ‘moist’? My mother was in her Third Third, too.

Role models all.

A Room of My Own

For all the time we’ve lived in this house – 25+ years – my office has been a small room downstairs, off the laundry room. That’s where my drafting table, desk, and table sat. There’s a big window onto the back yard.

That’s where I wrote my newspaper columns, filed my papers, and scheduled radio recordings. That’s where I did calligraphy, kept my bookshelves, and stored my office and art supplies.

And every time I went down to it, I felt like I was walking down, down, down into a dungeon. Tim would turn the heat on early; didn’t help. It could be toasty down there, but it was still a dungeon. It was light and I had beautiful art on the walls, but it was still a dungeon.

When Sophie was five, we moved her to the neighboring guest room downstairs: a double-sized room with space for her “stations”: dress-up area, reading area, monkey bars across the ceiling. That made my downstairs dungeon a more pleasant place; I had company. I even set up the table in my room as her craft table to finish a project.

But it was still a dungeon. Eventually, a junk room. I’d just throw stuff in there because all I needed really was a little hole to get to the computer.

Five months ago, I decided Sophie-the-adult was no longer thinking of this place as home. So I moved in. I took over her desk, moved out her bed. Moved in my desk and drafting table – with no junk on them so they could actually be used for drawing and painting!

I even took Sophie’s tiny tea set collection in the display case and moved it piece by piece to my old room. I had to take photos of each shelf to make sure I placed them just so.

What I have now: three windows that look in three different directions; the computer, the printer, and the scanner all in the same room; a place to write and then casually walk over to the tables where I can paint.

I come down here when it’s dark, when the sun is shining, when it’s early, when it’s late. I come down here at three in the morning. I come down here because simply walking in the room stimulates my creative juices. I come down here when I have too many ideas upstairs and I have to start working on them … downstairs.

I am a conscientious shopper: I check Consumer Reports, I get references, I research and research. Except when buying a house: for that, the clincher is walking in the door and if it feels right and comfortable and welcoming, I know it’s right. Our house home is all that and more for me … except for that little room that was my office (but now which makes a perfectly pleasant guest room).

I love my new room! I love how it makes me feel. I can’t really empirically describe why, but it feels right and comfortable and welcoming. If in my Third Third I want to feel at home in my life and skin, then it’s only reasonable to feel at home in my room.

Best advice I ever got:

A hum is when your decision feels just right, when the choice you’re making matches with the whole universe. It’s a hum through your whole being.

A snag, on the other hand, is a kink. A stumble. A rough spot in the smoothness. You can try to ignore snags, try to pretend you didn’t notice them, but really, you KNOW. You know it’s not right. Period. A wise person taught me to listen to my hums and snags when making choices. They don’t lie.

My new room is a hum. My old room was a snag I should have listened to years ago.

The Third Third is a time to act on old, lingering snags and find the hum.