Tag Archives: Year of No Clutter

Lunch at Our Table

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Lately, a surprising amount of my energy is devoted to the task of not being terrified. I’m a person who suffers from obsessive anxiety, so even pre-Corona virus I was really, really good at washing my hands. Like, I already sang the alphabet song.

Now I sing Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Luckily, for me, I have enough other things to keep my circular thought patterns at bay: the task of keeping a houseful of teenagers and young adults fed, for example. Ever since my daughter’s acting conservatory closed two weeks ago, we’ve had six under our roof, which is double our usual number, including Greta, her actor boyfriend, and her dear friend who is also studying acting.

I was delighted to have them all here, refugees from the panic that has become New York City. I was delighted too, that I could cook for them, because that always makes me feel that I am caring for people. It gives me purpose, makes me feel that I’m literally making the people around me more happy and healthy by feeding them nutritious, homemade food.

The only problem is that I’ve never cooked for the Brady Bunch before, and I keep wondering where the heck Alice is. Between the fact that I make pretty much everything from scratch, and was doing all the dishes? Three meals a day? With no “Hey! Let’s go out tonight and give Mom a break!” in sight?

It has knocked me for a serious loop. I was going to bed exhausted, planning meals in my head, and waking up exhausted, planning meals in my head. Why, you may be wondering, didn’t I ask for help? I don’t know. Part of it is sheer stubbornness. Another part of it is probably my unconscious, deciding that it was better to be on the brink of exhaustion than to think about the scary things that are going on in the world right now.

Thank goodness, things on the Eve Exhaustion Front have now significantly improved. I finally started accepting help when it was offered (imagine that!) and even asking for it upon occasion. We set up a calendar of chores so everyone in the house is now contributing every day. And Greta’s friend made the decision to fly home to her parents, which made us sad to lose her company, but in sheer practical terms also meant one less mouth to feed.

That’s a phrase that strikes me as very old-fashioned: “one less mouth to feed.” It reminds me of stories about the Depression, and the Little Rascals short films that took place in orphanages (“Don’t drink the milk!” “Why?” “It’s spoiled!”). I think about the American Girl historical fiction movies with their young characters living through World Wars and the Depression and their fictional family members who died or disappeared and all anyone could do was bring you a casserole.

What does any of this have to do with No Garbage? In my mind it’s all connected. In fact, weirdly enough, all three of my family adventure-projects seems bound up together for me in living through this current crisis: sugar, clutter, waste. All of these themes have to do with how we live our lives, and- perhaps you’ve noticed?- currently how we live our lives has been thoroughly upended.

For example: my younger daughter, Ilsa, needed a quiet place to park her laptop and attend “school” every morning, and our under-used upstairs room seemed the obvious choice. But, truth be told, this “Hell Room” (the room I spent the entirety of my Year of No Clutter clearing out) has been backsliding into Hellishness for some time now. So I had some work to do.

Interestingly, I discovered some newfound decluttering energy, and Ilsa and I cleared a neat space for her with little trouble. I think it was easier than my past efforts because I had a practical problem to solve, quickly, and thinking practically changes me: it makes me not think quite as much about tomorrow and some future self, but about what we need now, today. I liked the change. So much so that I’ve continued to clean and organize the rest of the room since: if I can manage to clear it out still further it could also become another good space for other things… reading, relaxing, being. I was surprised to realize that all it took was actually needing the space, to make me more effective and efficient.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen we are running a tighter, more efficient ship as well. Yes, No Sugar taught me to cook things from scratch, and yes, No Clutter has been teaching me about planning and thinking ahead to avoid packaging. But this new normal has been bringing home cooking and planning in our house to a new level, and it’s pretty much all lunch’s fault.

Once upon a time, the midday meal in our house had been a “winging it” affair, an amalgam of leftovers, “just in case” foods (“Don’t we have a frozen burrito left in there somewhere?”) and school lunches. Now? Now we have meals. Planned ones. Only. Every day I make sure we have a hot, sit-down meal to feed five people three separate times. This is because social distancing makes our grocery shopping no longer casual- “oh I’ll pick up some milk on the way home”- but instead infrequent, targeted and specific. It is also because we are feeding more people, and therefore the only way I can be sure there’s actually enough food for everyone to eat. It’s a lot of work, for sure, and sometimes I get very overwhelmed, but it’s no different than our ancestors have done for centuries.

As it turns out— and I’m as surprised as anyone about this— living No Sugar, No Clutter and No Garbage all lead to the same place: being thoughtful and devoting the time. When people are nostalgic for the “good old days” they’re not pining for beef shortages and the Whooping Cough, I’m pretty sure what they’re captivated by, when it comes down to it, is the pace. Even the Little Rascals sat down for breakfast together. Being thoughtful about your space, your resources, your food, where the objects of our life come from and where they all go; devoting the time to put those ideals into practice… getting objects to people who will love and use them, recycling and reusing, cooking as much as possible from scratch. These all sound like old-fashioned ideals that many will tell you just aren’t possible in modern society, but all they require is being thoughtful and devoting time.

How do we want to live? What kind of people do we want to be? If we try to find a silver lining in this crisis it could be that it is forcing so many of us to stop running headlong through life, believing we don’t have time for things. Life is time. If we are alive we have time, and don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t up to you how to spend it. What we, as a culture, need to do is stop ceding control of that time, those decisions about how we spend it, to someone or something else- our culture, our job, our technology, our expectations, or someone else’s.

Right now my daughter Greta is downstairs baking bread for lunch today. She won’t use sugar, create clutter or make any garbage in the process. Today we’ve done the best we can do, and that’s good enough. I know I was born with a truly exceptional ability to worry about the future, and that’s what comes easily. The harder part is reminding myself instead that today is what we have and often- often- that’s pretty darned good. The harder part is reminding myself to just be grateful for a family lunch at our table, and a still-warm loaf of bread.

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Homemade bread nourishes you twice: it’s relaxing to make it and delicious to eat it.

Here’s my favorite bread recipe, what Greta made today. If you make it let me know how it turns out!:

Oatmeal Sandwich Bread

  • 1 cup old fashioned oats
  • 3 cups boiling water
  • 1 1/2 Tbsp active dry yeast
  • 2 teaspoons kosher salt
  • 2 Tbsp olive oil
  • 1/2 cup barley malt syrup or brown rice syrup (in a pinch you can even use dark corn syrup, which is glucose not fructose)
  • 2 cups whole wheat flour
  • 5 cups all-purpose flour

In the bowl of a mixer, put a cup of oats. Pour boiling water over oats and let sit one hour.

At one hour, sprinkle the yeast, salt, and olive oil on top. Add the barley malt syrup and mix with dough hook. Stir in whole wheat flour. Stir in 2 cups of all-purpose flour. Then stir in 2 more cups of all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup at a time, mixing in between each addition.

Turn dough out onto a foured surface for kneading. Use the final cup of flour to add to dough whenever it gets sticky. Knead for five minutes, until dough has absorbed most of the final cup of flour and feels smooth. Place in a bowl and allow to rise for one hour.

Butter two loaf pans and heat oven to 350 degrees. After the hour has passed, turn dough onto counter, cut in half, and place each half in a bread pan. Allow to rise another 30 minutes.

Bake at 350 for 33 minutes. Remove bread from oven and allow to sit for five minutes before turning loaves out and letting cool on a rack.

 

 

 

You’ll Never Guess What Our New “Year of No” Is. Unless You Do.

A Year of No Sugar, Year of No Clutter, , , ,

I’M NERVOUS. Sorry- didn’t mean to yell- but I’m nervous. I’m also terribly excited- because… I have a new project. For some time now I’ve felt that the “Year of No” books really ought to be a series of three. Of course Year of No Sugar was my first book/family torture experiment and Year of No Clutter was the second. I had the idea for this third book ever since YONS was published in 2014, and have been chomping at the bit to do it ever since, but sometimes life gets in the way- you know how it is. So you’ll forgive me for any over-enthusiasm- I promise to stop pacing a hole in the carpet any minute now.

Why three? Well for one thing, I think three is just a really nice, satisfying number for a series of something, (two being too few and four being, you know, maybe a little show-offy.) Also, we did our Year of No Sugar adventure in 2011 when my kids were quite young, just 6 and 11, and the Year of No Clutter escapade took place in 2016 when they were 11 and 16. This third and final venture will involve them at ages 15 and 20- effectively spanning a nice, neat decade from beginning to end in the life of our family. You may recall that I have an ever so slight obsessive bent to my personality, so I do like things nice and neat.

And finally, thematically it will also make a lot of sense. I mean, hopefully to people other than just myself. But that explanation will have to wait. On New Year’s Day I’ll announce just what our family will be doing without for the entirely of 2020.

What do you think it will be? A Year of No People Magazine? A Year of No Taxidermy? A Year of No Cheese? Make a guess in the comments and if you get it right I’ll send you something really, really nice that is definitely probably not a Christmas re-gift from my Aunt Madeline.

The Life Changing Magic of Clear Plastic Storage Bins

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Don’t call me Marie Kondo. I’ll get all bent out of shape about it.

You see, in a world increasingly filled with downsizers, tiny houses and minimalists, I am a maximalist. I keep stuff. I wrote a whole book about keeping stuff. It was called Year of No Clutter because after several decades of keeping everything in sight, I had finally run out of room, and it took a whole year to figure out how to undo what I had done.

I had read every book ever written on decluttering. The result was that my pile of decluttering books contributed to the clutter. But all that was before Marie Kondo took the organizing world by storm, with her ideas about how our objects ought to “spark joy.”

Screen Shot 2019-07-07 at 4.51.48 PMIt’s one of those ideas that is so brilliantly simple that it changes the whole game. Why mess with lists of organizational mumbo jumbo when “spark joy” was all you really needed? And yet… despite the genius of her pithy message, and the appeal of her gentle-but-firm approach, I never was able to fully get on board with Kondo-ism, and I never knew why. Not that I haven’t tried. I’ve read the book. I’ve watched the Netflix series. If Subway made a Kon-Mari sandwich I’d have eaten it.

Yes, it bothered me that the Kon-Mari emphasis was on throwing things away rather than finding them new homes. (Next up: The Life Changing Magic of Topping off the Landfill!)

Yes, I worried that people in the throes of full-blown-Kondo hysteria would suffer declutterers-remorse when they came to their senses and realized they wanted back their old comic book collection/wedding dress/spleen.

Yes, it bothered me that Marie Kondo never discusses finer philosophical points of decluttering such as: What is the difference between clutter and a mess? (During my Year of No Clutter I came to the realization that this distinction is key: a mess is something anyone can clean up, because everything has a place where it is supposed to be. As in: “The kitchen is a mess.” Clutter, on the other hand, is the stuff that doesn’t have a place it belongs yet. Clutter is the result of unmade decisions; no one can undo it but you. As in: “What’s happening with this abandoned craft project?/ broken appliance?/ dead parrot?”)

But none of that was it. I never knew exactly what it was, until one day I posted a picture of a rag rug that I had made out of several boxes of old, sentimental clothing. I tagged the post “Definitely #notmariekondo”!

The reader who responded was a certified KonMari consultant.

“But it IS Marie Kondo!” she wrote. “It’s about keeping and valuing the things that make you happy! It’s beautiful!!”

Screen Shot 2019-07-07 at 4.49.16 PMThe reader’s comment gave me pause. Was she right? Was I following Kondo principles without even realizing it? By weaving my old clothes and other fabrics into a rug I had found a new way to take joy in them… right?

Then it hit me. Suddenly I knew the problem with Marie Kondo and KonMari and the whole philosophy of keeping only the things that “spark joy” and it is this: our relationship with objects changes over time.

Because we never know what tomorrow will bring, or how we will feel in it, we never know exactly what to save- what will spark joy in that strange, new place called the future. My admittedly flawed solution to this conundrum in the past had always been to save it ALL. I’d fill up unused closets and corners, create time capsules for the attic— care packages to my future self— and desperately hope to have some ability to sort it all out meaningfully someday in the future. Who would I be when I grew up? What would turn out to have been important? Like Egyptian mummies who have all their belongings packed neatly up around them for whatever the afterlife holds in store, I had to prepare for every possible future self.

Of course, no closet or attic space is infinite, and no matter how good you are at spatial relations this strategy only works for so long. To a certain extent I’ve now become the person I would be when I grew up, and I’m relieved to be able to answer some of those questions at last. Opening up those time capsules from another era often presents either a clear “I’m so glad I saved this!” or a wonderfully freeing “oh, I don’t need that!” And if it doesn’t, I know what to do: I pack it right back up and return it to the attic. It just hasn’t been enough time yet.Screen Shot 2019-07-07 at 5.01.55 PM

In this decidedly un-Kondo-esque manner, I had held on to a whole host of things that any Kon-Mari consultant worth their salt would surely have advised me to pitch. College-era tie-dyes, a never-worn kilt, torn flannel nightgowns, my girls’ outgrown childhood dresses, a skirt I wore the year I met my husband… they were all packed up in boxes in the attic, patiently waiting for me to figure out a new way for them to be in my life. And then I realized I could make them into something new. When woven together they became what I called my Autobiography Rug. It was one of the greatest successes of the whole Year of No Clutter project and there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t walk into the room where it now lies and smile, out of the corner of my eye identifying one fabric or another from the series of happy memories it represents, one after another, woven together. It is soft, squishy and pleasing under the feet and riotously colorful. It brings me great… joy.

Remember the story of the Velveteen Rabbit? Some things don’t reveal their potential right away. They need time to have their fur worn off and their tail to come unsewn to become real. These things can take time, and that is the thing the Kon-Mari method doesn’t account for. Think of all the museums that are filled with objects that once upon a time someone probably should have thrown away. The Kon-Mari method of objects sparking joy is one barometer, a tool, and a darned good one at that, but I think we do ourselves— and our future selves— a disservice if it is the only one we use. Sometimes intuition, sentimentality, and even luck have crucial roles to play in what gets saved, and that’s as it should be.

We all keep things for reasons perhaps no one else could possibly understand— and thank goodness for that. Sometimes humans are far too sensible for our own good, and many of our objects could benefit from some buffer time, a vacation if you will, to serve as protection from our own good intentions.

A good sturdy attic box might be just the thing.