December 12. Because we’re approaching the winter solstice, which to me is midwinter and the hinge of the year, not the beginning of winter, I was thinking about writing about weather. One day in October, the temperature in Long Beach reached 111 degrees. A couple weeks later, it was freezing cold. Well, hardly freezing. Penguins would point at SoCal and giggle. But it did get down to about 37 a couple nights. Then we had a few days in the eighties. And now we’re having a ten-year rain. Streets will be flooded here. I have friends who live in the Midwest and are enduring temperatures way below zero, and I’m just not feeling mean enough to gloat about our Mediterranean climate.
So ...... change of subject. Yesterday I did a witch census in my new apartment. I picked up a pad and pencil and walked around. Marching en masse across my filing cabinet: 46. On top of the tall bookcase in my office: 14. On top of my hutch: 23. On the floor under the hutch: eight, plus the Muppet-size witch sitting on the nifty chair I bought at Goodwill. In the kitchen: eight, including three Barbies in their original boxes. One is Samantha from Bewitched. My definition of “witch” is pretty broad, so I counted four of the eight or nine rubber duckies in the bathroom and most of my cat witches (well, they are wearing pointy hats). On one wall in my bedroom: 25. On the shelves above my bed: 19 + 13 + 3 + 12. It’s a sort of headboard. When I look up, I see witchy feet. On the black bookcases in the living room: 22. I count and recount because—cross my heart!—the girls move. Census results: 326 witches are living in my apartment, not counting me and the doll in the pointy hat who rides in the back seat of my car (with her own seatbelt). I sent the census results to my friend, Margaret. She wrote back that I’ll need to stop collecting when I hit 500. I should live that long.
Maybe I can blame it on being double Cancer (sun and rising), which makes me a nest-builder. Nest? How many feathers does a nest need?? I also live with a hundred or so goddess figures (no recent census), more books than I want to count, more DVDs and CDs than I want to count, and a closet full of clothes. Plus enough art hanging on the walls that the landlord’s icky white paint is largely hidden. That’s some serious collecting. So, I ask myself, when is enough enough?
December 13. I sent emails to psychologists I know and asked them for the psychological view of collecting. My first reply came from Dr. Ronald Howard, whose book I edited five years ago. Ron lives in Houston, and after Hurricane Katrina hit, he took his graduate students to local shelters to give free counseling to refugees from New Orleans. Ron distinguished between hoarding— there are no paths between piles of witches and books and clothes in my apartment!—and collecting. “One can create a shrine that symbolizes how he or she engulfs life from the core of their existence,” he wrote. “Most individuals tend to collect items that build their museum of life.” I like that: I live in the museum of my life.December 15. As you can see, my writing process can take several days. I write a bit, then let it marinate, then edit what I wrote and write some more. Today I received a reply from Dr. Rex Finnegan, a retired professor of psychology from Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. Rex and I knew each other as undergraduates at Southeast Missouri State College (that was before it upgraded to university) and met again in graduate school in the counseling psychology program. Here’s a bit of Rex’s reply. “Some people (think U.S. Depression-era folks) did not have enough to get by on, and had to almost ‘hoard’ to live. When times got better, many of these people continued to ‘gather’ and hold on to things (acquisitive behavior), even though there was no longer the need. Often people collect things they found it difficult to obtain at an earlier time in their lives (think of car collectors). And always think of the struggling graduate student, who has little to no money to buy anything ‘extra.’” I think I must be in gathering mode. I can afford to buy witches and art today, but I have made sacrifices to buy them in the past. My parents graduated from high school at the height of the Great Depression and lived frugally. They taught frugality to me, but I think it’s worn off. I’m collecting art and witches and books and movies in which people sing and dance because those things bring me joy.
December 19. Let me finish with two stanzas from a poem, “On Collecting,” by my friend Patricia Kelly. She used to live in Queens, NY, but retired a couple years ago and now lives in Santa Barbara. You can visit her website where you can read her haikus and see her splendid photos. She sent me this poem about writing poetry in 1989:
I add these fading traces to other orphaned lines:
like that stark wire against the sky
on which dark birds perch as if waiting
to escape through the blue trapdoor of dawn.
I cull and hoard lines from lost poems
the way my grandmother, during the Great
Depression, saved the least bit of string,
knotted end to end and wound round
and round in a motley globe.