Dear Writers

I am a secret hoarder. You can be a secret hoarder when you have a big house with lots of closets and a garage. Your friends will think you are one of the tidiest and most organized people they know. They are wrong.

You cannot be a secret hoarder when you live in a condo, and you share a big underground garage with 500 other people where only cars, not stuff, are allowed. You cannot be a secret hoarder when your only storage area is a 4x8 cage. Still, my 4x8 cage is a tower of wonders--bins stacked on bins stacked on shelves, the walls lined with s-hooks hanging all the things I want to someday need but might not ever need.

I prepared for the great downsizing. I gave things away. I had an auction. I gave more things away. I sold things to friends. I sold probably half my furniture to the new owners of my big house. I gave still more things away. But still, I have dozens of pens. Dozens of markers, and document clips, and paper clips, and pencils, and rubber bands, and envelopes. And hundreds of post-its and boxes of staples. I have journals and more journals, both empty and full. I have index cards, and journals made of tear-out index cards. I have books and more books. I have so many books that I cried yesterday when I tried to fit them on my fabulous wall unit after it got installed. There wasn't enough room even though I made more space in my bedroom and in my closet. So, weeping while I worked, I boxed up four boxes of books to give away. And I lived.

Long live e-books. Long live my book-sized iPad mini. Long live the written word. Long live poetry, and novels, and memoir. Long live essay collections, and story collections, and anthologies and books about birds and whales. Long live books written by dear friends, and writers I'll never meet. Long live all those words that have mended all the broken places, filled the empty places, and emptied out the places full of sorrow and bitterness. Dear writers of those words, thank you.

Here in the Land of Lakes, not quakes

waiting for the fireworks

The barometer of my body says it's in a new and different place. My hair wants to part on the other side, and I'm still lost in this curvy city by the big river. But last night I connected the place where I went out for a glass of wine with the neighborhood I live in and the neighborhood where my St. Paul condo was. Three dots on a map of a zillion dots.

I'm afraid to drive here. Don't get into the bike lane when you turn, and watch out for the orange cones, orange cones, orange cones. There are giant potholes and trenches in the interstates (don't say freeway) from all the construction. And don't say the 94 or the 35W. Here you just take plain 94 or 35 W to wherever. And let's not talk about the W. Anxiety ramps up in the car like it did after the divorce when I marooned myself in my condo in South Pasadena, going to almost nothing. But I can walk or take the train. My new (to me) red Subaru has been christened Freiya, and I will drive her...eventually.

The sky is bigger and bluer here. Sky is distinctly separate from clouds. No grey linty what-is-what sky. Storm clouds barrel in every other night or so, and  lightning unzips the darkness. The 5th floor is a very satisfactory height from which to view the drama.

There is free yoga in the park before the farmer's market. Two seconds lying on the grass and I'm five years old because it smells like childhood. (That's me bottom right.)

The produce in the farmers' market cascades into more variety every week. First it was only asparagus and rhubarb and peonies. Then morels and bok choy. Now squash and lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, green beans, new kinds of spinach, gooseberries and red currants, and so much more.

A huge crowd came to fireworks along the river. Standing room only by the moment of showtime,and then bound in by rows and rows of people. It  sounds terrible, but it wasn't. The next morning it was all cleaned up even though they said 75,000 people came.

My living room still has its wall of boxes of books, and file boxes strewn with things I'm too lazy to file because it means bending down or lifting the box. And the TV is on a card table, but my bedroom is perfect with my favorite art hanging above the bed. And there's my desk where maybe the muse can find me if I ever sit down there.

Sometimes the morning light makes the view look like a painting. I see beauty everywhere, but I miss my friends. I wish they were here in the land of lakes instead of the land of quakes.

Why I like to complain

I relish the opportunity to address an injustice--even if it's just 1st world consumer problem. I figure if I can get duped, many others are getting duped too, and if I plead my case, it might stop the fraudulent practice.

Pottery Barn is running  a variation on a bait and switch with their rewards program. I bought a sofa.  The sales person highly touted the credit card as a fabulous rewards program. “They’re doing triple bonus points and you'll have hundreds of dollars in rewards to spend!" Indeed an email came, bearing my  generous reward. The email delivering the reward, said to "save this email as a record of your current rewards balance," along with lots of bold boxed print about how to earn more rewards and get 10% back!  Subsequently I called in a phone order to buy an end table with my reward dollars. Neither the sales person who sold me the sofa, nor the agent taking the phone order mentioned that the reward can only be used a single time, regardless of the amount being spent. Today when I tried to order another table over the phone, using the balance of my reward, I was told that I had no rewards balance because I had already used the certificate. Imagine if you had 100,000 miles in an airlines reward program, and you used 15,000 miles to upgrade and then were told that was it, you had no more miles to spend. Pottery Barn is not offering a legitimate rewards program. Services were offered that were later revoked. The email with the rewards certificate is misleading, in that it mentions the record of my rewards "balance." The purpose of this "rewards" program is, I believe to lure consumers to sign up for the credit card, and thereby the company and Comenity Bank reap the rewards of fees and interest without delivering on their promise of rewards to the consumer.

Oh--and when I tried to sort this out over the phone with customer service and asked to speak to a supervisor, I was told there was no supervisor currently available. And that there would never be a supervisor available to discuss this. And no, no one would be calling me back.

P.S. the Pottery Barn "family" includes William Sonoma, West Elm, Mark and Graham, and something I've never heard of called Rejuvenation. This fraud may be going on across the board.

Onward. To bigger things. I hope.