A Roundabout Life

"What are you doing tonight?" Linda asked late one November Saturday afternoon.

"I'm going to organize the craft room," I said. "I've been frustrated lately because I can't find what I want when I want it."

"But...well, okay...Have fun!" She sounded mystified and skeptical.

Linda would never organize her craft room on a Saturday night, even if her craft room is so neat that one imagines ten minutes would do the trick. Such tasks would be relegated to weekday mornings or afternoons.

She is retired, as am I. Linda goes to bed within a twenty-minute window. Her internal alarm clock wakes her about the same time every morning. She has her morning routine. She is ready for the day by nine. She has a husband. She cooks. She cleans. She shops. She socializes. She plays pickleball. She works on her art. She does whatever she planned. If I call her during the time period she says she is going to do something, it's unusual if she isn't doing that particular thing.

As for me, I go to bed within a four-hour window. I wake and get up sometime between 4:30 and 9 am, usually. I give myself forty-five minutes to scroll on my phone, then make a list of things I'd like to accomplish.

If you happen to ask me early in the day what I've planned, I will rattle off a few things from my list. If there are appointments, I'm almost sure to attend.

But if it’s a stay-at-home day, and if you call later and ask how things are going, I will likely be engaged in something that wasn’t on my list or radar. It’s the yin to the yang of living alone. I can “flow” wherever I want, after the necessities of life are accomplished.

Unlike most people, I rarely watch TV, mostly because fourteen years ago when I divorced, I couldn’t afford cable. I didn’t have a strong habit of sitting down to enjoy it anyway because the ex was always snoring in his recliner in front of the TV. Now I can afford cable or streaming channels, but even when I subscribe to a streaming platform I forget to tune in, even though I enjoy it when I initially join.

Friends and strangers alike sometimes ask, when they realize I’m totally ignorant of what is on TV or HBO or Disney or Netflix, “But what do you do in the evening?” I struggle to answer since I have no routine. I know I sound inane.

“Well, uh, last night I found all my clothes I need to mend and put them in a pile. And I finished making a few cards. Um, I ran my little robot mop. I made a couple of labels. Oh! And I found a great article on how to buy a mattress these days……” By that time their feet are pointing away from me.

But back to organizing the craft room. Where to start? The two shelving units along one wall were somewhat organized from a major overhaul a few months ago, but they’d been ransacked more than once and needed attention. My five-foot-long worktable was piled with a thousand miscellaneous items and there were some boxes in front of the shelves that I’d have to deal with to gain free access to the shelves.

So, of course, I decided to make fire starters. The collected components of dryer lint, toilet paper tubes, used birthday candles, and leftover candle wax were a project waiting for me. I’d clear six whole inches of space on the shelves if I did it, so it was a step towards organizing the room. Right?

My thought was to give the fire starters to my son, who enjoys making bonfires in the summer and fall. Then he wouldn’t have to use that nasty flammable liquid.

I needed some paper shreds for the project too. Oh my! That shredder should have been emptied a couple of weeks ago. The pile reached into the teeth. It was a wonder that the motor wasn’t burnt out. Thirty minutes later, after I resorted to using tweezers to remove the tightly packed paper from the maw, I headed to the kitchen with my paraphernalia.

While the leftover candle wax blobs melted in a pan, I cut the TP tubes in half to make two shorter tubes. I had 17 used birthday candles, so I’d make 17 fire starters. What to put them in? A muffin tin, I decided, and that new silicone large ice cube tray. I set to work assembling the tubes, stuffing dryer lint at the bottom then paper shreds. The paper shreds wanted to spring out as fast as I could pat them in.

I fished the pieces of wick and metal discs from the melted wax and poured enough of the wax in each tube to “set” the bottom layer and then let them cool while melting more wax. I repeated twice more, stuffing in as many paper shreds as I could, and added the final flourish of a used birthday candle at the top. I cleaned up. The whole process took about three hours.

“I should try one out,” I thought. “But what can I set it in? Something metal, but not my good cookware…”

Oh! I have a tabletop fireplace, now don’t I? It was a half price impulse buy made a couple of months ago. It’s round, cement, about 5” tall and 6” across, with a metal-lined depression in the top. It was waiting patiently for me on the deck table. It was waiting patiently for me to buy fuel for it. I didn’t want to buy fuel for it. The suggested fuel was expensive and not ecological.

A reasonable question might be, "Why did she buy it if she didn’t want to buy fuel for it?"

<crickets>

It was now a dark and windy 40 degrees outside. This called for my winter jacket and hat, as well as the parabolic heater. I chose a derelict-looking fire starter in which the birthday candle leaned forty-five degrees over the side.

The fifth match was a charm, timed between gusts of wind. In five seconds, the flame shot up a foot and then licked down and over the side of the little fireplace then up again. Geez, I should have brought the fire extinguisher out here! I carefully moved it to the exact middle of the table.

I stared happily into the fire as I am wont to do whenever I am near one. It puts me in a calm little place.

Thirty-five minutes later it guttered out.

Wow! Perfect!

I didn’t know when I started the evening that I’d make something to solve my fireplace fuel dilemma.

My son can make his own.

Who needs TV when such fun can be had?

And don’t even get me started about the fun I had cleaning black mold from my washing machine gasket the other night…