With labor day behind us and the first autumn leaves skittering across the patio, it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. I’m not all that ambitious by nature, so it must be the cooler temperatures that have me energized. Or maybe it’s a residue of all those years of summer vacation when we were kids. School has started, the fun’s over, and now they’re piling on the assignments.

So now I’m faced with all the work I’ve been putting off all summer. First up is the upstairs bedroom that the kids and Gail stripped in June of its circa 1972 red shag carpet and emptied of furniture and all the stuff the boys had been storing there since they were 3 and 11. For much of their youth, this was Aaron and Nick’s room, and their marks are all over it. The dents in the plaster are from hockey pucks, I suspect; the yellow swaths of scotch tape from their posters and art; the U of M decal on the window a memento from Aaron’s Freshman year in Ann Arbor. In 2001, when Aaron was briefly at home after finishing college, he and Nick painted a mural across the entire west wall. The mural has given our family much pleasure over the years, but this weekend Gail and I set ourselves the task of painting the room, as part of our new fix-it-up and clean-it-up policy. After deliberation we decided we had no choice but to cover the mural. Tough decision. But we want the room to be either a guest room or, perhaps, the new master bedroom, and in either case the mural must go. I hope some future conservator can figure out a way to get back to the masterpiece beneath.

There’s also the issue of unfinished work work. Like everyone I know, I start many projects but finish only a few. But unlike more organized, mature, and clear-headed people, I never throw away the work I abandon. That’s probably because I think of it as pending, not abandoned. It wasn’t a problem for the first decade or so of my career, but now that I’ve been at it for a full geologic epoch, the unfinished stuff is heaped to the rafters.

I won’t burden you with the complete list, but here, in the leaf-turning spirit of the new season, is some of the stuff I intend to finish this fall and winter:

– a short story that I’ve been working on for a ridiculously long time – an embarrassingly long time – more than ten years — that begins with the sentence: “Monkeys make poor pets.”

– an inquiry into the literal and figurative trails that weave through our lives.

– a batch of short (and short-short) stories about men behaving badly. (Very badly.)

– a long essay that might end up being a short book celebrating the wind.

– an essay about starlings and William Shakespeare.

– a study of Niagara Falls and the bizarre industries that have collected around it.

– approximately 20 poems that have burst upon me in recent months and are howling for attention.

– an essay about the man who saved my father from drowning when he was 17 years old.

– an homage to white space on the page and roominess in our lives (have you ever noticed how much room there is in the word “room”?)

So, to work. A fresh sheet of paper in the old Royal beater. Roll it up, indent, fingers on QWERTY. Begin:

“Monkey’s make poor pets. But how could Melody know?…”