My mother died in 2017 but every so often she still shows up to lecture me about what I should be doing, in a way that implies that I definitely need the guidance and without being properly instructed I’d obviously just do it all wrong.
I am spending some time at my Bonus Parents’ place right now, helping out as one of them recovers from major surgery. While I’m here I’ve been helping to do some decluttering.
Confession: I love decluttering and organizing and as a result don’t often get to do it in my own house because it’s already been done (I am also married to a declutterer, not a reclutterer). The quality and intensity of instant gratification I obtain from turfing out the contents of a cupboard or cleaning out the fridge is almost druglike. I’m not a minimalist but I am ruthless in my pursuit of the Morrisonian dictum “If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
This is a quotation from a lecture William Morris gave to the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design in 1880 called “The Beauty of Life," a lecture before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design in 1880) and later published in Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London, and Nottingham, 1878 - 1881. I like it because it tells you exactly what to do without compromising your choice or agency in any way. If the thing is useful to you? Fantastic, it stays. If you think it’s beautiful? Absolutely.
But some things are not useful, and clutter, for the most part, is made up of a lot of things that don’t earn their keep or don’t do so any more. It also has a tendency to obscure other things that are under or behind it, so there are things behind the things that are categorically not useful because they don’t get used, hidden as they are by another layer of objects. Sometimes some of those things are in fact very useful once you know they’re there and can get to them.
Whether clutter is beautiful is squarely in the eye of the beholder, and I would not assume an answer. But I do know that it tends to be unuseful, in and of itself, and to make it more difficult to find and use the things that are useful. Sorting through it, getting rid of the things that don’t serve us well, and returning the things that do serve us well to a clean space (might as well clean any cupboard/drawer/etc. while it’s empty, I say) in an orderly way that lets you see what you’ve got so you can use what you have… so satisfying, for me. Sometimes even cathartic. It is absolutely something that relieves stress for me. I also get a lot of joy and fulfilment out of helping other people, especially when there are things that I can do easily and happily that they cannot do either easily or happily. So it has been a great thing for me that my Bonus Parents have been graciously putting up with my engaging in some Clutter Whispering while I’m here.
Last night, having whispered the clutter out of all but the most Stygian depths of one of those corner kitchen cupboards into which one basically must crawl halfway in order to get to all the stuff that’s been shoved alllllllll the way to the back, effectively into the very furthest corner of the room, I saw a gleaming soup kettle set complete with a pasta colander insert whoosit and a substantial steamer basket, of the same sort of pan of which my late mother had an entire set.
I pulled it out, and out of curiosity removed the lid. And there she was. Sitting in the bottom of the steamer basket, pencilled in my late mother’s handwriting on an orange sheet of the sort of square notepad she always seemed to have around, a three-word imperative: “Wash Before Using.”
I could hear her voice in my head saying it, and had a vivid memory of her emphatically writing directions and to-do lists on those brightly-colored paper squares, a liberal assortment of which was at any given time Scotch-taped to the fronts of kitchen cupboards or affixed by magnet to the refrigerator door. I used to joke that she decorated in Instructions.
“Oh hi mom,” I said, shaking my head and replacing the lid.
I’m going to leave the note in there when I donate the pot to the charity shop. I figure maybe someone else needs to be told.
I am not sure whether to laugh, cry, or offer you a hug. Whatever you find either useful or beautiful, I guess.
OMG, my parents had those pots and pans! They were sold through something similar to Tupperware parties, I think.