Sunday night the insomnia ghosts came calling. You know the ones. Anxiety. Inspiration. Critical reflection. Hunger. The usual roster.

Inspiration was loudest that night. Of course, the muse.

I’ve been racking my brain for what to do with the discarded tarot card boxes. When I take a deck apart for a mix deck, the original box gets left behind. They’re beautiful little things, sometimes the prettiest part of the deck. I can’t throw them away. Recycling doesn’t feel like enough. Reuse is the way.

But in what way?

I’ve had ideas. Fancy decoupage to repackage the mix decks. Reasonable, but a lot of extra work for a product that’s already a lot of work and that some people will think should cost less than it does anyway. I could turn the boxes into elaborate little artworks and sell them on their own. But I’m very good at making things and very bad at selling them. Commerce and I have never been close.

So there I was, awake, with a stack of little boxes waiting to be used for something more than clutter.

And they started to remind me of sauce packets.

I was a sauce packet hoarder. Cute title, not a cute issue.

Any time a sauce packet came home with food, I tucked it aside in case I needed it later. Drawers full of them. I don’t know what kind of sauce emergency I was preparing for. The emergency never came. Eventually I threw them all out, and they went where I hadn’t wanted them to go, which was the landfill.

The sauce packet war was the primary positive result of my first year on anti-anxiety meds in my 30s. I hadn’t known I was hoarding sauce packets to manage the feeling of having no control over my own life. That’s the kind of thing you don’t see until you stop doing it.

I think a lot of us are buried under piles of sauce packets of our own making.

Back to the boxes.

In the muse-hour I realized that if I could just secure them to one another, they could form something. A structure. Initially I pictured little display shelves for tarot decks. Then the muse got greedy. TAPE THEM ALL TOGETHER. Wall scale. Cover the walls of our very-early-1900s rental in plaster-covered cardboard cells.

My muse is always greedy. She overwhelms me.

That’s when I put my mental foot down.

If we go to sleep, I told myself, we can tape together as many boxes as you want. Tomorrow…

So Monday morning, after a little tea, I pulled boxes off the shelf and started sorting which ones might go with which.

Three days in, I’ll tell you, it has continued to feel like a kindergarten art project. I didn’t have a plan. I taped boxes together in configurations that looked pleasing. I slathered the backs with the old crusty wall plaster left over from when we moved in. I patched the joints with the mesh tape you use to cover small holes in walls before you patch them, because I realized the joints needed help. I needed a palette knife. I needed more plaster. I needed smaller pieces too, because the first one I built? 13 boxes. I knew it was going to get heavy, but I’d never made anything like this before and despite thinking I did, I didn’t actually understand the way it would be heavy until I had slathered the back of the 13-box structure.

A full If You Give a Mouse a Cookie afternoon. Stretched into three days.

Five of them exist now. The individual boxes are now secured together forever. They’re taking shape. They’re heavy.

I’m starting to think I should have papier-mâchéd first and plastered after, but live and learn. I’ve never had great history with reading instructions before I start a thing. And since I’m making it up as I go along…

The 13-box one is going to need little feet. It’s too heavy and the weight’s not distributed evenly enough to hang. So I’ll give it feet and let it stand. Maybe the little ones want to stand too. Who knows. They haven’t said.

I thought these were going to be display shelves for tarot decks. I had a use in mind before I cut the first piece of tape. The boxes didn’t know that yet, and neither did I, really. Once I let go of “this is for tarot display,” they got more fun. I added a tiny lid to one of them as a tiny little shelf just to see what would happen to the shape. To see what I was doing.

I don’t know what they are. I don’t know what they’re for. And I don’t know what I’ll do with them.

So many of us, when we make a thing, want to know what it is first. So we can know whether we’re making it correctly. We need it to be for something. For sale. For the wall. For a person. For a use. We’re afraid of making sauce packets again. Useless little hoards taking up the drawer.

But these aren’t sauce packets. I know because I’m not hoarding them. I’m building with them.

They might be altars. They might be shelves. They might be sculptures. They might be little dioramas. They might be a wall someday after all, if the muse wins and I lose.

Well no, they won’t be. At least not in this house. But I like to let them think big.