My fly tying desk in the throes of spring cleaning.

This evening, trouble rode into town. I opened a bag of hackle and there they were: the dried husks of bugs. As I counted the husks, and ran what had been feathers but was now a fine dust between my fingers, I also counted the hours ahead that it would take for me to clean it up and to prevent all the other materials in my burgeoning collection from becoming infected.

And so, this evening became a night of cleaning. If only cleaning were a linear line from a mess to a pristine pile; instead, the path to cleanliness first passes through a greater mess than the original mess — the mess that got you into this mess in the first place. And so it was that my tying desk, and the boxes around it, necessarily erupted, spewing materials everywhere. I sat at the eye of the storm, empty boxes and bags to my left, desk in front of me, and materials to my right. I suspect that if I had a time lapse of the sequence, it would appear as the legs of the Looney Toons Road Runner: a blur of feathers. Or, in this case, a blur of bags, of markers, of feathers, pelts, and as yet unidentified animals, all merging into various drawers and boxes.

The incident has caused me to clean some of my materials more deeply. I’m drafting a post now on that process, which I’ll share with you shortly. I’ll look forward to your stories how of you clean and store your materials.

In the meantime, anyone else doing some spring cleaning?