Add a chewing noise

Here we have entered the short days of the year, with the studio feeling rather chilly but always welcoming. I went in this morning to see whether I might find inspiration in the strong colors of our shadows to make a new painting, and poked around a bit.

But wait…what was that mess of trash on the floor right under the table easel? (And my table easel is five feet wide by three deep, so it is a big item indeed.) There were bits of paper, and some fluff and a batch of pencils and a pen. Brushes, on the floor? Hey, what were my erasers doing over on the other side of the rug? And what’s that by the base of my chair, a palette knife? I am not that careless, really. I picked these items up, but I had this feeling, and it wasn’t a good feeling. I pulled out the long drawer in the front of the table easel and… yuck. Yuck. There were shreds of drying fruit, feijoas and apples, a number of gnawn walnut shells. There were several more pencils and some bits of colored chalk, and items I didn’t recognize.

I realized that to get to the bottom of this, I must take down the seven foot wide painting on the table easel and winkle myself around behind the table part of the easel (which is set at a near-vertical angle) to see what might be seen. I was convinced I had tree rats, (pack rats, trade rats, dusky-footed woodrats– best known as Neotoma fuscipes.) I fetched a stool, a long grabbit reacher tool, pulled on my gloves and put on my face mask. Wriggling into position, I was flabbergasted.

Yes, some little furry had been making a nest behind my easel, but that’s not all. I saw an unsheathed x-acto knife in the mass, its triangular blade shining. Metal items, tin foil. There were perhaps a dozen brushes– maybe more (more turns out later, to be correct, as I disassemble the nest.) Sticks, shredded old gallery invitations, several palette knives of varied morphologies, paper clips and bulldog clips. Two small tubes of paint. Gloves, some chewed, some intact.

It was just a few days ago that I wanted to put numbers on the backs of some new paintings and was wondering how on earth I had mislaid my Sharpie markers. It was just a day ago that I wanted to take a stray brush bristle out of a wet painting, but could not locate my tweezers. Hadn’t I had three sets?Was it my aging inattention that had mislaid these? Nope. Our friend the woodrat had taken them. Three new Sharpies lolled in the nest. Four sets of tweezers.

Now the last time I had a rat nest in the studio, twenty years ago, I had one that held a wrist watch, some plastic beads and more than forty push pins. I’d been impressed then, however the magnitude and imagination of today’s discovery was way more ambitious.

Then I saw something that made me stare.

A memory stick. Now in this modern world there is little so alarming as the imagined theft of your memory. With fresh urgency I used my grabbit to start retrieving my stuff and disassemble the nest.

Taking a break after a first armload of trash and gnawings had been carefully extracted and bagged, I noticed the little glass bowl in which I put my memory sticks. I’d been sitting in the studio writing during nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) and thus had a handful of memory sticks I’d been using– some with data or ideas I’d had, but most of them with novel scraps and one with a major body of work– over 60,000 words of the new novel for this year. You know, there are many writers who worry that someone might steal their magnum opus. I’ve never worried before because every writer I know only cares about his or her or their own novel , not anyone else’s. I stand corrected. Now… after years of insouciance, I have cause to worry. There was not one single solitary memory stick left in that blessed glass bowl.

By the time this long truly dreadful job was done, I rescued ten memory sticks from the rat’s clutches. Are there some still missing?

You know, my aging brain has decided to plead the fifth. Scarlett, we’ll think about it tomorrow.