I didn’t decorate for Halloween.  

I’m talking about Christmas today. Really. I am. 

But in case you haven’t picked up on it, I don’t know where to start. 

Ooh — I know. We’ll start with the day I bought my house.  

The same way every haunted house story starts. 

Except I do not have a haunted house. 

Well, now I don’t. I did. But we’ll talk about that next Halloween. 

OK. My house. 

It doesn’t have a basement.  

It once had an attic, accessible through a door in the hallway. 

So creepy. 

We converted that attic into a master bedroom suite.  

Which is great.  

I was the first person to use the shower. I decorated it from the ground up. And saying I have a four-story house makes me sound like Gwyneth. 

I like sounding like Gwyneth. 

But when we lost the attic, we lost storage space. 

Oh sure, we have a garage.  

I once found a snake’s skin in there.  

So no. I’m not storing anything in that reptile house masquerading as a garage. 

We have a shed too. 

But spiders laid eggs on my skis. So the shed is not a storage option, either. 

Spider eggs on my skis. I really do sound like Gwyneth. 

When converting the attic to the master suite, we also built a storeroom. 

Helpful, but for two things. 

Most obviously, whatever sinister thing normally residing in attics the world over now occupies the storeroom right next to my bedroom. 

I sleep alone about a quarter of the year. That’s a scary situation. 

When I see light shining around the storeroom door, I wonder if I forgot to turn off the light, or if the demon waiting to get me is, like, hosting his book club. 

The other problem with the storeroom is its diminutive size. 

All the things too important to toss, too irrelevant to use, crowd together in our storeroom, like commuters on a rush hour train. 

I mean, sure. I could demand my husband get rid of the hockey cards he hasn’t looked at since he was going to marry the vegan. 

But he might tell me my clarinet has to go.  

Let me be clear.  

My clarinet will never go.  

The cork joints have rotted away. I’ve forgotten how to read music. I haven’t played my clarinet since I planned to marry that guy with all the piercings. 

But my clarinet and I are a package deal. 

So it all stays.  

Then Indy and Willie moved to the Temple of Doom. 

Meaning they had to declutter. 

Meaning they moved everything they couldn’t fit into the Temple of Doom into my storeroom. 

I didn’t intend to house Indy and Willie’s stuff.  

Like everything with those two, I start out like Roy Scheider in Jaws, all safe on the beach crowing about how I don’t get in the water. 

But before I know it, I’m chartering a boat to catch the stupid shark myself. 

You have no idea what it’s like to declutter with Willie.  

She told Indy to get rid of his stuff. All of it.  

Telling Indy to throw anything away is like telling Freddy Krueger to let people sleep in peace. Indy, at the time, still had my grandmother’s artificial leg. 

She died in 1991. 

And she wasn’t even his mother. 

So I told Indy he could keep his stuff at my house. 

That was how I wound up with Indy’s reel-to-reel movie projector, complete with film canisters labeled “Okinawa.” 

“Do not watch those,” my husband said, because Indy was a footloose Marine when he was stationed in Okinawa. 

My husband is probably right. 

But I’m feeling like I’ll watch them. 

Willie sorted through her stuff with angst. Would she have room for her sewing machine? Fake Christmas tree? Nursing award? 

So I offered to temporarily store it all at my house. 

That was five years ago. 

The storeroom, like a dense jungle, could only be navigated with a compass and machete.  

So this summer, I reorganized.  

I stacked shelves with books and photo albums. Christmas decorations teetered in boxes all the way to the ceiling. Indy’s projector nestled next to Willie’s sewing machine. 

I thought again about watching those reels from Okinawa. 

It’s probably a bad idea, right? 

Only one way to find out. 

On October first, I opened the storeroom door, ready for pumpkins and skulls. 

And discovered the shelves had collapsed. 

Onto the bin of Halloween decorations. 

I closed the door. 

I was not doing this. Not that day. 

But now it’s Christmastime. 

And my Christmas decorations are behind the Leaning Tower of Pisa that is my storeroom shelving. 

So last weekend, I once again pulled everything from the storeroom.  

Once again, I contemplated the Okinawa tapes. 

I retrieved the Christmas decorations. Then I Tetrised everything back into the storeroom. 

And it all — it all fit. Beautifully. Easily.  

That was when I realized everything fit so well because none of the Christmas decorations were in the storeroom. 

Which means I have to pull everything out again. 

Which means I have a few movies to watch. 

Of Indy. 

In Okinawa. 

Bye.