There are fifteen boxes of stuff in my attic. Fifteen boxes of journals, letters, photos, projects, and some things too peculiar to describe. Despite the fact that they hold memories of the most nostalgic variety, I try not to travel to those territories. The life of a thirteen year-old girl or a twenty year-old woman doesn’t make a jot of sense from my current perspective, even now that I’m 35. No obscure memory can compete with today’s four layer mocha pudding pie or tomorrow’s movie premier.

Why keep it all then? I imagine that one day I’ll get amnesia and have to reconstruct my life. I’ll curl up in an old cherry rocking chair and page through the musty dreams of a girl who seems not at all like me. I’ll figure out who I was, and who I am, and maybe, where I’m going.

The boxes are piled so high because even at thirteen I had a passion for documentation and an analytical eye inherited from my statistician dad. I debated the merits of tanzarine versus clementine nail polish shades. I rated my boyfriends on a five-point scale for passion, romance, and technical skill. I thought long and hard about such radical moves as saying “no” to my mother.

Three years back from thirteen was my first diary which described the bliss of snacking on balls of smushed up white bread and orange jello. It must have been there that I became a writer. My style of discourse at eight was not all that different from now, somewhat rambling with an eye to philosophy and food. The technical part came later, when I wrote office manuals on how to run a pet sitting business or how to manage an organic produce store. I figure all that was genetic because my mom always said that my dad’s brain was like an antique roll-top desk with a hundred pigeonhole storage places, each neatly labeled. No antique desks are handy, so my mind organizes incoming data into color coded file folders, alphabetized neatly into the hard drive of my mind.

It isn’t just meandering journal entries and how-to books that populate the boxes though. A short foray into fiction resulted in nothing of import. You’d think that all those mystery novels would have gotten the sleighbells jingling, but clearly any imprint was fast covered up by the next snow. Since I don’t read non-fiction, I am wholly dependent on my sister to provide synopses of the books she’s convinced I should read, but knows I never will. I couldn’t countenance all that research stuff anyway, libraries just don’t agree with me.

Due probably to a scarcity of alternatives, my writing eventually evolved into a series of essays on spirit in everyday life. In the beginning, spirit had to “move” me before any words materialized. Writing on demand seemed a little commercial somehow. I was wrong though. The process of writing itself creates inspiration, although on a bad day it is unquestionably easier to write a movie review than something engaging the heart.

Although my repertoire includes journalistic columns, it’s the works from the soul that move people. Spirit speaks through me, touching others in a way that I rarely do on my own. I also get a little “fame” which is good for the ego, although it hasn’t done much for my wallet. Still, that can change, and when it does, I’ll be ready with fifteen crates of collateral materials.