ORGANIZING JUST ONE THING

I’m sitting at my kitchen table looking out at my garden. The mucronulatum azaelea is just starting to show red leaves, the little braided one from Katharine, the priest at my church (and my friend), which she brought to me in the hospital in January is blooming profusely…obviously still mixed up about its seasons. The day promises to be one of those wonderful warm autumn days called Indian Summer in New England (which are supposed to happen after a frost which we haven’t had yet, and haven’t had in October for years. Climate change seems to favor New England). My thoughts run (very slowly I admit) to fall cleanup chores. They consist of putting the porch furniture from all porches into the barn, rolling up the porch rugs and finding someplace in the basement for them (the basement... a story for another day). I should bring the citrus trees and as many of the geraniums as I can cram in to the small greenhouse…but not today, Scott is making repairs to it. So I will focus on a major clutter magnet inside the house.

There are several of these: the piano (but I filed all the music on it away earlier), the coatrack in the front hall (not bad right now), the back hall table (actually quick and easy), the dressing room (only a bag of summer clothes to take downstairs), the tables in our bedroom (book and magazine clutter, and of course, knitting projects), and finally the biggies: my desk and the kitchen table. It’ll be the kitchen table since I’m sitting right at it. It has on it, in addition to a pretty woven tablecloth with orange, red and yellow stripes, the following:
3 cloth napkins.
A white metal trivet.
My water glass.
A large footed fruit bowl.
A pile of magazines and catalogues.
A folded woven striped tablecloth which is too small for the table .
Eight candlesticks (two pewter with candles, two glass, one wooden gold-painted angel, three brass ).
The Whole Green Catalogue.
Eleven cookbooks (including The King Arthur Flour Baking Book, both volumes of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The Joy of Cooking, Molly Katzen’s Vegetable Heaven and six others under them.
Three cloth shopping bags.
My music bag (OK, it’s on the chair, but that counts).
One potholder, one tea cozy.
A notebook and three pencils.
A small bowl of calcium chews.
A tea tin with Grace Tea’s Owner’s Blend tea.
Two placemats.
A doll’s dress for a teddy bear, which I intend to knit.
A beautiful pottery sugar bowl, made by my friend Daisy’s very talented potter daughter Adero Willard.
A ladder thingie with five votive candles on it.
Three other votives.
Four ceramic ducks.
A blue pitcher with what were once fresh autumn flowers, now become a dried bouquet.
A mailing envelope with a CD of a radio talk Rudy gave last week.
Bits of yarn and a yarn label.
A cardboard tray for catfood cans.

The reason this is not a truly daunting project is that I have a place somewhere else for all this stuff. I have to chose between all those candlesticks and votives, and the rest go in the bottom of the Welsh dresser. The fruit bowl, the napkins and the placemats actually belong on the table. The cookbooks have their bookcase, and so on.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if, like me, one’s kitchen tastes run to the 1989 country variety…oak and maple unfitted cupboards, wooden floors, butcher block and oriental rugs, with lots of things around, you’d better have a place, (or two or three) to stash the stuff in some orderly way, or it could get to be overwhelming. I think that if I lived in a smaller house, my tastes might get much simpler very fast. But I’m lucky, both of our houses are quite large and have outbuildings, even the one in Cambridge which has a carriage barn. People have offered to buy this barn for a lot of money to convert into a small house. We don’t really need the extra money, so it has what carriage barns were built to have in them…cars, garden equipment, bikes, and house leftovers or out-of-favors.

The Victorians understood a few things about living graciously, and we benefit from these today. I don’t have the house’s original complement of three live-in servants and several outside daily people. Instead we have wonderful Dina who comes for a few hours every other week to clean out the worst of our mess, and Scott who lives with us and does our carpentry and repairs. We have Jim and his guys who paint one side of the house every year and repair any roof things that aren’t slate. We have John who shovels at exactly the right moment after every snowfall. We have Carlos who delivers our milk and butter from a suburban farm. We have Boston Organics who bring (usually locally-sourced) organic fruits and vegetables and eggs every week.

One can easily find local farms and people who deliver milk, painters, carpenters, roofers, masons on the Internet. I find cards from cleaning people on my porch every week. Better yet, ask the neighbors. Mike sent John to us, a real estate agent sent us Scott. Other recommendations brought Jim to us (who practically lives on our street he has so much work). Our chimneys are currently being repaired by a mason who did work at our church. A new plumber is currently being auditioned. All these people need the work, and we need them. It’s called community building and it’s really important at this time in our history.

The table cleaning is finished and time for a sushi break!