The First Pile I remember having was in my room as a child.
I had only recently moved into a room of my own in the basement, and in the corner of it sat a retired living room chair upholstered with multicolored plaid fabric. Behind it hung my bulletin board of serial killers I found most intriguing which, even at the time, felt a little performative sometimes. If I practiced the motions, could I shop at Hot Topic one day??? (No.)
But I hardly used the chair for lounging. It held all my once or twice worn clothing, in the limbo between dirty and clean. Its seat unavailable, I sat perched on the arm of the chair, using an adjacent space heater as a footrest until it threatened to scald me through my socks.
In my first college dorm, a laundry basket in my closet served as the ever-growing and shrinking pile. And when I moved into a house after my second year of college, I moved a pile of clothes from my bed to the floor and back most nights.
In ten years I moved as many times, and I always had a pile.
In this current year 2025, after living in the same house for seven years, The Pile has roots. Its own personality. A smugness with the knowledge that it is so low to the bottom of my to-do list. My family’s care, meal prep, and upkeep of the common rooms take priority.
The Pile is sometimes reduced in size/weakened, but never truly dormant. No longer only partially clean clothes, books and spare papers and lotion I feel like I might need some day contribute to its mass. I plug my phone in for the night and toss it indiscriminately, letting The Pile swallow it. Recovering it is a problem for the morning.
So when my husband and my son are scheduled to travel to Rapid City without me (long story short, I had to choose between going to Europe or South Dakota and it was HARD. I love South Dakota!!), I set a goal to tame The Pile for good. With five days home alone and far less responsibility than usual, I was confident enough to encourage my husband to get one last look at The Pile and say goodbye.
On Monday, my first day solo, I wake later than I’d expected. When my family is home, someone usually wakes me. The dog whines to be let out, the cat screams to be fed, or my four-year-old son approaches my bed and asks me to play a game with him before my eyes are open.
His current favorite is a roleplaying exercise where he pretends to be a rock on the side of the road that I lug home. When I’ve placed it pleasingly in my front yard, it morphs from a rock to a dragon that demands to be fed a hyper-specific meal. I do not miss the rock game this morning, as I rise and clock into work.
The ninety-degree heat battles against the efforts of our window AC units and makes considerable blows, warming the house uncomfortably. Seeking a change of scenery and the sanctuary of crisp central air conditioning, I drive to the library. I journal for two straight hours, mostly petty concerns not meant for anyone’s eyes or ears.
Arriving home, I eat dinner straight from the fridge, letting it da-ding da-ding da-ding to indicate I have left the door open too long. Wrapping baby pickles and cheese in salami, I shovel them straight into my mouth. I cup grapes into the bowl of my palm and eat them one by one. No plate dirtied.
Afterwards, I craft a complicated card for my dad’s upcoming birthday and watch The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. When my family is here, I might watch something both my husband and I can enjoy and we keep the volume level low as to not wake our son. In the absence of anyone else to consider, the contentious chatter of the wives blares from the speakers.
I fold into bed. In the glow of my nightlight, The Pile is the last thing I see.
Though we live fifty miles apart, I always assume I’ll see my dad at Costco. We frequent the same location, and he is there often. When I visit on Tuesday at the midday, I’m confident I’ll see him. And I’m proven right when I find him in the most Dad place ever- talking to a Costco vendor about kitchen countertop replacements or something. Positioning myself in his peripheral line of vision, I creep closer and closer until he notices. We agree to shop separately and meet at the food court. I buy him a $1.50 hot dog combo and he tries to pay me back.
I plan to address The Pile immediately after work, but I’m hit with a minor inconvenience via email and spend two hours after I clock out in a prone position, too depressed to do anything. When my son and husband are home, I feel they are most often likely to alter my mood or distract me, even positively. During this week, I hoped to find true productivity. But in this moment, I realize I really need them to pull me from my funks.
After bullying myself about it enough, I rise and take the dog for a walk. Someone keeps leaving orange peels under a park bench and I take this personally. No little woodland creature eats orange peels, and they do not simply rejoin the soil as this litterbug might believe. I consider how I could get them to stop without ever catching them in the act. Maybe I’ll write “Stop leaving your orange peels here or I’ll curse you” on the bench in Sharpie. That would work on me.
Isolating myself to my room for a while, I begin work on The Pile. Sorting through my extensive stack of books yet to be read, warm sweaters I forgot to store with my other cooler weather clothes, tampons I don’t like but keep for emergencies, I find a number of old journals. I open one from 2013.
“I might lose my energy drink virginity tonight” reads one riveting excerpt.
A few pages later I’m hit with this one, “Watching kids getting picked up from daycare and looking at their parents. I wonder if they’re happy. Will I be happy at that age? I wonder if I’ll look back on myself now and want to kick myself for something. I feel real anxiety in perhaps disappointing my future self.” Woof. I put the journals aside.
After an hour or so, I’m pleased with the amount of work I’ve done for the day. But the room is a disaster, my progress unclear as The Pile has split into several. My bed supports two massive mountains of clothes – one for keeping and one for donation. Shutting off the lamp, I cross the hall and sleep in the vacant spare bedroom instead.
The moment I realized I’d be home alone for a week, I scheduled an IRL friendship interaction for Wednesday. I figured I’d be lonely by then, the illusion of interpersonal communication via working from home and brief grocery store interactions sure to find me disconnected. I travel an hour south to visit friends. They’ve prepared a delightful meal for me, for which I sit between them at the table. This never fails to make me feel like a very treasured guest. The three of us watch Never Been Kissed on DVD afterwards, a movie that has aged poorly in its themes but has a STACKED cast.
Driving home, I relish the treat that is being out after dark. I hardly leave the house after my son has been tucked into bed these days. I let the summer air snarl my hair as it whips through my car’s open windows. I mostly dislike summertime, but this feeling is unique to these warmer months.
Back in my room, I spend another hour digging through The Pile. Tossing deodorants I must admit I won’t use (I actually don’t want my armpits to smell like apple cider, Native holiday collection) and printed accident reports from my son’s daycare they give to me every time he bonks his head. While I separate trash from not, I half-watch a documentary about a woman that fell off a cruise ship thirty years ago and hasn’t been seen since. I know this will give me nightmares and it does.
On Thursday, my solitude has lost its charm. I miss my family, and I’m disappointed I haven’t accomplished as much as I wanted to. The Pile calls to me when I pass it walking down the hallway and I shut it behind a door, sending a clear message.
My bad mood leaks into the evening, threatening to ruin my highly anticipated social plans. I know being around kind and interesting people will fix my attitude, but mobilizing is hard.
My friend Julia’s husband, Sam, invented Garlic Party last year to celebrate the harvest of his many varieties of garlic. The cloves are infused into oils for taste testing, children participate in a pin-the-scape-on-the-garlic-bulb game, and everyone is invited to harvest more garlic from their extensive garden. As it turns out, Garlic Party is the softest cloud to land on. I warm to socializing slowly, greeting the resident chickens, dipping delicious focaccia bread into garlic oils, and digging my fingers into soil to loosen garlic bulbs. The satisfaction of pulling them cleanly from the ground thrills and replenishes me, and I regain my ability to mingle. A group of men express their gratitude for the friendship they share in a male loneliness epidemic, a circle of moms discuss whether or not to introduce the idea of Santa Claus to their young children, and the merit of each garlic is considered.
Though I’m energized upon my return, The Pile will have to wait. I’m gathering with some family tomorrow for a weekend cabin stay and I’ve set high expectations for myself as far as my contributions. I prepare a pasta salad, strawberry refresher drink, and a fruit salad. The key to the fruit salad is to dice watermelon, mango, kiwi, and strawberry into very small pieces. So each bite contains multiple flavors. I chop chop chop chop chop chop chop into the night, do the dishes, and collapse into bed.
Friday morning, with only hours till I’m scheduled to leave, I resign myself to the fact that The Pile will remain. I make the bedroom useable again by stuffing my clothing donations into trash bags for transit. Everything else is shamefully shuffled back into the corner of the room.
After tidying the rest of the house, packing, and driving, I arrive at the cabin and into the arms of loved ones. My mom, aunt, grandma, and sister and I dip into the lake, chat and laugh endlessly, snack, swing on a zipline, apply facemasks and listen to spa music, and watch each night as a treefrog emerges and hunts moths from the cabin’s sliding glass door. We cheer as he captures them, watching his belly fill and stick heavily to the glass.
When we eat the fruit salad, everyone marvels at how small the pieces are. I don’t realize how desperate I am to hear it until my grandma says, “This must have taken you hours to prepare.”
The concept of “little by little” is popular, even to me, when applied to different projects. I make to-do lists and cross off items as they’re completed. And I’m locked into this idea of writing and creativity for the long haul, even if it’s time consuming and challenging. But I really hoped that identifying the problem of The Pile, plus time to address it, would find it quickly solved. But not yet.
There may be fewer mediocre novels in the stack. Less crumpled receipts, less clothing. But much of it remains. A reminder of the limitations of time and resources in this life.
Come for the poignant and funny observations! Stay for the incredibly charming illustrations. This is so thoughtful and well written in how it depicts both a human experience (having a pile!) and the human condition (never enough time.) I am regularly impressed by you!
Because of second child's bedroom and the weird layout of our house our pile is now in the LIVING ROOM in full sight of any visitor. Humiliating. Another relatable read 🙌🏼