You can’t go far these days without running across the oft-repeated advice to pare down, scale back, declutter. You’ve likely found that advice at one time or another on these pages as well. But I have been thinking about the flip side lately, about the way ‘things’ touch our hearts and trigger deep emotions. A few weeks ago a reader noticed a transferware plate in my blog post and recognized it as the pattern her mother had. She had lost her mom and had few treasures to remember her by. She said it may sound silly but that plate took her back. We surfed to track down some more.
And fwiw, it didn’t sound one bit silly to me. Of course, I am the woman who has about 30 years of selected home decor magazine back issues in crates under my bed too. Why? They break all the declutter rules of modern efficiency experts. Is this pack ratting to a fault? Maybe. It seemed to me though,that nostalgia is not a luxury but a connection to an essential part of my psyche. In our attempts to ruthlessly cull and pitch sometimes we sever from ourselves from the very things that bind together our pasts and our futures. I am not willing to do that.
It occurred to me that these volumes serve as a journal of sorts. They preserve my past the way other people’s diaries do for them. The old Country Living’s don’t necessarily hang around because the room styles are likely to grace my own at some point. They are reminders of the birth of the ‘back to the land’ and ‘simplifying’ movements of the 70s. The homeowners featured within those covers were responding to a void they felt coming out of the atomic age, a void I felt beginning my family in suburbia. They planted the seeds of earthy honesty in me and nurtured a desire to connect to something substantial before I could even articulate what that might be. The Victoria back issues speak to all that is innocent and lovely in the world and in my heart. They inspire me to step it up, to reach for excellence, to remember that presentation is important, to recall an era when form trumped function and beauty was its own excuse.
These magazines also remind me of where I was when I first read them. Generally, in the living room of my mother’s 1917 home. When we moved from Milwaukee to a small central Wisconsin town we bought our one and only house. It was a tall, narrow post-Victorian with original oak woodwork and pocket doors. The crowning glory was a turret on the second floor bedroom. That room I claimed before the papers were even signed. The house was ooooold. Musty. Cracked plaster walls. Decrepit outbuildings posing as a garage and garden shed. I loved every inch of it. It had permanence and heritage, things I still value.
That house was, and is, my mother’s passion. She stencilled the walls, crocheted lacey window coverings, planted perennials. Always we scoured the pages of those magazines for ideas and inspiration. Sometimes it came together well. Other times the limitations of two small-ish women pulled us up short. But always we had a vision.
When I married and criss crossed the globe I returned again again to that old house and those old magazines called to me like family photo albums. My mother made scrapbooks out of some of them. The rest she eventually gave to me. I couldn’t part with them any more than I could part with my wedding pics or my baby books, half finished though they may be. The images all take me to other times and places, to thoughts I used to think, and dreams I used to entertain.
The same could be said for my blue willow tea cups or any number of odds and ends I have carried with me across the country. I have a blue delft plate the brings to mind the most grueling summer of my life when I lived in Europe as an exchange student. Some kids brought home designer clothes, I brought home dishes. I also have a fragile Christmas ornament – disintegrating contact paper housing a bicentennial quarter from my beloved 5th grade teacher. She was the daughter of a family friends who became an unwed mother. When I see that quarter I think of the apartment she and her new husband lived in – a second story Milwaukee bungalow where I visited on snow days. I think of the smell of her new baby’s head. I think of the little drops of chicken fat floating on the surface of her mother’s soup. And I think of the people who loved me and helped me navigate the difficult waters of latchkey living.
In a recent Better Homes and Gardens issue there were two military families who have large collections of Thanksgiving tableware and candles. It may seem counter intuitive to haul large collections of ANYthing from base to base. For their families, however, the familiar plates that grace their tables year after year help provide the stability that is threatened by transient living. I realized that my things have worked the same way for my family. Houses change, zipcodes change. These old things are tangible bits of continuity in our life.
Should you live in squalor? No. I believe you should be ruthless with your junk mail, your ratty towels, your tupperware with the missing lids. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If your heart is calling you, listen.
