Dandelion Wine, Part IV

Speaking of organization and reorganization: ... how can you organize your life, if you have no clutter? The one requires the other. It strikes me that the more clutter you have, the greater is your potential for leading a life of organization. Therefore, to make your life simpler through organization, clutter it, first.

I recommend auctions. We re-clutter our lives on a regular basis by that means.

Wine-making offers an example of this principle. To make wine you need a certain amount of equipment. In our case, we pick up vessels and bits of equipment in a piecemeal manner, often counting on chance opportunities to arise at garage sales and auctions. As a result, our winemaking has happened amidst a burgeoning chaos, requiring odds and ends of this and that, scattered here and there through the house.

Gradually as we picked up more equipment (clutter) and know-how (mental clutter) we managed to better use our space and our hours (organization). Organization is impossible without clutter.

I am not saying we have reached an optimal situation. The optimal situation would call for more clutter than we have accumulated, as of yet.

Cheers ...

Dandelion Wine, Part III

While it seems strange in retrospect to have made only two batches of dandelion wine last year, this year having found ourselves thrust into the thick of spring activities makes it easy to know why: garden-plot digging and widening, garden-plot weeding, lawn-mowing, seed-planting ...

If dandelions would only flower more conveniently at mid-winter, we would make more of the stuff.

A greenhouse for dandelions ... not a completely irrational idea.

Retrospective accomplishments often seem sparse. Take my writing record: last year my record of publications will always look sparse, in large part because of the twenty-ton monolithic slab of C.M. Kornbluth biography that planted itself there. Comparable to the meagerness of our dandelion-wine production is the slimness of my poetry-publication record last year ... or of my short-fiction publication record ... victims of the ever-more-complex pie-cutting of my active hours ...

And how will this year look? -- especially after adding one more reason for enlarging the daily pie, to make room for this public journalizing, AKA bloggerie? ("Blog, blog, blog," Martha said to Lorna this morning while I was sitting in the parlor with pencil and notebook in hand. "It's a Blog eat Blog world.") ... but will this year look even more sparse than last?

The method behind the madness of making huge pies of one's life is Organization -- and constant Reorganization. I keep hoping the reorganizing aspect will diminish with time -- although such aspects of the situation as having no guest rooms except my workspace may guarantee forced reorganizations for years to come.

It seems promising, though, that in the course of the present weeks of house-and-life reorganizations, we have started three batches of dandelion wine, which are fermenting away in two two-gallon and one three-gallon crocks.

Cheers ...