I love camping, sleeping in a tent, which is where most of my friends and I part ways.  But I have great memories of lying in the star-filled air on the Navajo reservation and in the Grand Teton forest where you can’t even see the next campsite, as well as sitting awed for hours in the Swiss Alps, watching the mountain reflected in the tiny, perfect lake (okay, there isn’t that much else to do in Eggbergen).

       This is not a paean to Nature, however, just an observation that even with a Coleman stove and a couple of pans we were able to eat well--a prelude to pulling apart my kitchen to downsize it with the new Monday Morning challenge in mind.  

    Back in the day, cookbooks printed lists of what you needed to have in a fully functioning kitchen.  So I pulled out The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukens to see what they suggested.  Tom and I were both interested in cooking once upon a time.

    Rosso and Lukens wisely break kitchens down into three types: Basic, Complete, and Professional.  I found most of what they suggest for the Basic kitchen, with the exception of an oven thermometer, a salad spinner, and a kitchen scale.  But our kitchen doesn’t meet the Complete Kitchen standard (no waffle iron or individual souffle ramkins etc.) and Professional is off the charts.  A mother-of-pearl caviar spoon?  Oh shoot, I must have given ours away.

    Even before starting, I can think of several sticking points.  We have two colanders, one a very large, bright stainless steel from Williams-Sonoma, the other smaller, dull-finished and slightly dented that we’ve had forever.  Guess which one we always use to drain pasta?  Another problem is the large, gorgeously colored Kitchen Aid mixer (ours is royal blue) that everyone once needed and that I haven’t used in years.  It takes up prime space, a consideration since we converted our pantry to a sunroom a few years ago.

    So I’m heading into the kitchen with a carton and the image of other people happily using  what I discard.  I also want to be able to easily find what I need to cook a meal without having to move stuff to pull it out.  

    I’m curious as to how this will play out!  I’ll report on Friday, along with several responses from you.

        Some days I'm overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what is in my house.  A few years ago a TV special, Affluenza: The All-Conduming Epidemic,  showed people around the world lined up with all their possessions in front of their homes.  As you can guess, people in some other countries could actually do this.  Not many Americans I know could.   Most of us, unless we have to deal with it all to move, don't even realize the amount of things tucked away.

           A woman (who had been very defensive about keeping her mother's battered baking tins) once asked me after a library workshop, "So what is it hurting?"  Maybe nothing.  But that's what I plan to find out.  The lure of living life lightly is just too strong.

 
    The One That Got Away


          No, I’m not talking about the relationships you’ve let slip through your fingers sometime in the past or the people you only glimpse when your train is headed in the opposite direction, as Susanna McCorkle sang.  This blog is about stuff, after all.  I’m also not talking about things you once had and deaccessioned.  The one that got away is something you never actually had--that you had the choice to have it and didn’t take it. 

                   There were good reasons, of course, practical reasons, why you didn’t grab whatever it was.  It was too bulky; too expensive; you didn’t know what you would do with it; other people said it was silly.  And yet.  And yet. . .

              The thing that got away from me was when I was in my twenties.  It was at a country auction in Pennsylvania near where we were staying, an old wooden organ, fancifully painted with designs-- garlands and cherubs, gardens and bucolic scenes.  It was immediate love on my part.  I wandered around outside the farmhouse, trying to get interested in pottery bowls and charming doorstops.  But I kept coming back to my organ and staring at it.

            And that’s all I did.  There was no way to get it home, after all, and no place to put it if I did, although I could imagine it as the centerpiece of any room.  I didn’t play the organ, I wasn’t even musically inclined.  It was its presence as an ambassador from a kinder, gentler time, a piece of a vanished world, that must have made me nostalgic.  Maybe it was just a thing of beauty.

           I’m still not sure what the attraction was.  Worse, I can no longer picture the organ.  But that morning I successfully fought the temptation to bid on it--and for years afterward, whenever I remembered it, it was with a kind of longing and regret.  Why hadn’t I . .   

           There’s a lesson here, I guess, about seizing the day, about going with your deepest instincts, about taking leaps of faith.  Or perhaps the lesson is that you don’t get everything you want in life, that being practical is a virtue, that self-restraint is good for the soul.

         Take your pick.

    Surely I’m not the only one who’s had this experience, who’s wanted something they didn’t get, who was denied it either by themselves or someone else.  If so, I’d love to hear the story!   

MM Challenge: The One That Got Away

       The psychology of stuff isn’t just about saying goodbye to what you own or denying yourself something you really want.  But sometimes we do that anyway.  What are you sorry you didn’t go for?  Come trade experiences at the blog, judiculbertson.net.
    

         I didn’t post yesterday because I started out by reclaiming my office after putting together my Garden Club newsletter, then moved on to assembling materials for our taxes.  In the evening we went to see Tom’s school’s production of The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’ angst-filled family drama.  Just another day in Paradise.

         The thing that bothers me most about doing the taxes is not the work itself or even the fact that we’ll have to pay this year--it’s our accountant.  He’s a brilliant and down-to-earth man, financially astute, and uber-conservative about the IRS.  I like him.  But he would be happiest if we gave the government all our money and let them dole out to us what they saw fit.  (Or is that what already happens?)

          He’s going to think that the withholding on one account is still not enough, or that with two other disbursements I decided to wait till the end of the year to pay what we owed.  Because he’s a financial planner for large estates, he doesn’t quite approve of our disinterest in money: We get it, we spend it, we try to do some good with it, but it’s not our focus; I don’t write books you can take to the bank.  He makes me feel like some slap-happy hippie planning a world tour instead of paying the light bill.

         That said, he knows everything about the Tax Code and in 20+ years we’ve never been audited.  It’s also not his fault that I look at our list of charitable contributions and think, The world is in crisis!  Why didn’t we do more!

         What does this have to do with “stuff?”  I guess it goes back to Sister Jose Hobday’s philosophy of the simple life and her vow of poverty.  Time to get back to that.

      I received this comment yesterday and find it very moving.  It goes to the heart of how we feel about the things we inherit:

        "I have some old pans, knives and various cutlery that belonged to my mother. She passed away in 1986, left the United States in 1973 and moved out of the apartment she shared with my father in 1968. That means her hand has not rested on any of these since at least 1968, if not earlier. That's 44 years. I held on to these for 2/3 of my life, as if I could somehow capture her essence in these things.

       The pans are dented, the knives are dull and the cutlery is all mismatched. Useless dreck, to sum up. My mother is not in her pans or anything else. I keep her in my heart and whisper a prayer to her memory every night. These things were her tools and she turned her back on them without hesitation when it was time for her to move on. The one thing I kept that I actually use was her sewing machine. It works better than anything on the market today.

         The other things gave her no joy. And even if they did, they were hers, not mine. It's time for them to go.

Thanks for giving me the courage to finally move on, too."

         Back in the day, when I was first discovering the joys of living an uncluttered life, I would sometimes come across items that belonged on the “Things I’m Hanging Onto for No Good Reason” list.  You know; that stuff that just seems to stick around.  Things that aren’t family heirlooms or even particularly valuable.  They just are.

           Sometimes I would do what I suggest to my workshops when people complain that they feel overwhelmed: Leave the house and go to a cafe for coffee, diet Coke, or something stronger.  Take out a notebook and mentally go through each room.  You don’t always have to physically see something to make a decision about it.  You know very well what they are. 

          When I was feeling stymied, I would do it and come up with a list that looked something like this:

                 Item                                       Rationale

    Bridesmaid dress                        No reason good enough to keep it.

    Animal cookie cutters                 I might use them--if I ever made                                                                                       cookies.

   Throw pillows that no longer     No reason good enough to keep.
            match anything

   Past hotel brochures                     I might want to write a travel                                                              story about the area; offer them                                                                 to other people; take a walk down                                                              Memory Lane.

              And so on.  Even for the things for which I had a rationale, writing it down in black and white made me see it for what it was.  Was I really going to make miniature giraffes and lions anytime soon?  It was about as likely as making new covers for those throw pillows--and I didn’t even try using that as an excuse.

              Writing items down and the possible reasons for keeping them helps to objectify whatever it is.  It’s like moving an old lamp out of the corner where it has stood for years and into the light of a hallway.  Doing that strips the lamp of its past connotations and emotional baggage and helps you see that the cord is frayed, it’s no longer your style, and it goes through light bulbs much too quickly.  It no longer has history on its side--it’s only been in the hall for five minutes.

              Once you objectify physical things or anything else in your life, you can see more clearly what it is and how to handle it.

              I’d love to post some examples of your “No good enough  reason to keep” stuff!  It's always interesting to see whar other people are attached to and why.