Now is the time for “spring breakup.” No, I don’t mean the ice leaving the harbors and the boats headed for other ports. I mean cleaning home, office and car.

With an office redesign soon underway in our Superior Street headquarters, it’s a mad dash to decide whether I really need four hats here (including moose cap with antlers), whether my foot-tall corn-husk bunny would feel more comfortable at home or if the space could be better used for, oh, I don’t know, work projects.

These are easily answered questions for normal people - like my husband. He still doesn’t understand why a giant purple pushpin lamp with a cork base was a good buy. That it actually turns on when you push it - pushpin, get it? - does not impress him.

Then again, he was not raised as a beachcombing agate-picker.

My folks taught us to value - and to pick up and bring home - those delightful surprises that wash up on Lake Superior shores. This rule applied to small wild animals that ran slower than we did and to sticks in the shape of small animals that we found in the woods.

Sum total of this philosophy is that our house in general and my room in particular often resembled the backyard after the snow melts in spring. Where did all that junk come from? I swear it wasn’t there before the snow fell.

Seems to me that this beachcomber or rockpicker attitude tends to control a person … or not. Some folks have it, some folks don’t. Some folks return from a stroll along the shore stroll with pockets bulging from take-me-home finds and some folks who marry them simply prefer to leave pebbles, driftwood and natural doodads in their natural setting.

Once these “gifts,” as I like to call them, make it into the house, there is the problem of the proper placement. Certain spouses might argue that a “coffee table” is for coffee cups or a “book shelf” really should hold books instead of, say, a stone from the eastern reaches of Lake Superior that has an otter shape on it and the small sidekick rock that came west with it. (You can’t make a stone travel by itself all the way from the Sault.)

Anyway, I was going to tell you about our offices. We’re undergoing a makeover and we were hoping that you’ll drop by to see the remodeled spaces. Some of our authors will be here to meet you, too.

Please see the invitation … and know that you are invited.

By the time you arrive, the husk bunny will either still be here or will have hopped away home, basking in the purple light of a brilliantly conceived pushpin.

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