A Walker in the Suburbs

Yesterday’s presentation was for wordsmiths, so the organizer tailored it to her audience. “Think of it as editing your stuff,” she said. You’re creating white space. Less is more. She didn’t actually say “kill your darlings,” but that’s what she meant. “You want white space,” she said. “You don’t want to walk into a study that’s like a bad article.”

Clearing clutter is a mental game, of course, so what I appreciated most were the pep talks, the encouraging language, the mantras. “Think of it as breaking up with your stuff,” she said. Sort your materials into past, present and future. “If 99 percent of it is from the past then you are keeping the future out. You don’t want to turn your home office into a museum.”

Or this decluttering mantra: “You are not your stuff.” You’re not your books or your file folders or your hard-won interview notes. “Learn to detach.”

For longtime pack rats like me, these are hard words to assimilate. But the organizer also had this practical, benign tactic. Cull your files. Put the refuse in a bin and move it from the office to the hall, from the hall to the garage. If you can live without those papers for a few weeks, then out they go.

Deep breaths. I’m going in …

Photo of a cluttered garage will have to do. I have no photos of a cluttered file cabinet.

Last weekend, in a fit of home-improvement fervor, we went couch shopping. There had been a near fatal injury to the old futon in the basement, and if it goes, I reasoned, then we can move the office couch down to the basement and buy a new couch for the office.

So we found a couch last Sunday. It was a rich chocolate brown, comfy for sitting or lying down — and within our price range. We didn’t buy it right away, though. We wanted to measure the basement stairway angles. “It will be tight,” Tom said.

Today, we decided to see just how tight it would be. And the answer is: impossibly tight. But it was interesting to see our old sleeper sofa upended, and it gave us a marvelous excuse to vacuum and dust.

Meanwhile, the futon in the basement may have life in it yet. And the sofa in the office is once again ensconced in its tatty old slipcover. We’re back to shabby chic.

Write about a neighborhood, the assignment said. At first I didn’t want to write about ours. It’s the suburbs, after all, that which confounds and conflicts me. So I considered Idle Hour in Lexington, where I lived from age 3 to 10. Or the High Line in Manhattan, neighborhood of the air.

After several false starts, I decided to go small, became a miniaturist, to look at our house, street and subdivision from a number of different angles.

Something like this:

–>

When I lived in New York, I once sublet a studio apartment in this building. The arrangements were sketchy, as sublets so often were, and in less than six months time the original renter told me she would have to return.

It was not a hard decision. I had been existing in a space the size of a large walk-in closet. It was so small that when I gave a wedding shower for a friend I realized once all seven had arrived that there was literally no place to put their presents. Every other surface was being used.

It was during my time in this place (and earlier, when I lived in a studio in Chicago) that I began dreaming that there was an annex to my apartment, another room or cubbyhole that I had somehow overlooked. How splendid, my dreaming self would think, all this space, and I hadn’t realized it before. Now I can spread out. Now I can breathe. And then, I would wake up.

Dreams of space. When the body is deprived, the mind compensates.

I have no scrub brush, no feather duster, no complicated set of tools. I use paper towels, spray cleaner and what used to be known as “elbow grease.” Yesterday, I attacked the bathroom armed only with these. I scrubbed, wiped and polished. Weeks of travel and activities had taken their toll and I removed layers of dust, mildew and soap scum. This morning’s reward is a newborn bathroom with fluffy rugs and hair in the hairbrush, where it belongs.

The kingdom of clean. It is smooth and crisp and cool to the touch. Sometimes, in our house, it’s as faraway as a fairytale. But I like to go there sometime, even as a tourist.

Watching the new Masterpiece Theater production of “Downton Abbey” last night I marveled at the number of servants a family of five required: a butler, housekeeper, valet and ladies’ maid, a cook and assistant, several footmen, scullery maids and numerous others.

That this imaginary family of two parents and three daughters is the same configuration as my own sets my mind to spinning. What sort of servants would I like to have? A chauffeur would be nice, as would a cook and scullery maid. Perhaps we could find a servant who specializes in the throwing out of junk and the organizing of basements (an indentured closet organizer?). Seasonal assistance would be most welcome: a gardener in the spring, summer and fall; a personal shopper for the holidays.

The only problem with such a large staff is finding a place to house them in our snug house. But then, one doesn’t have to worry about such things with fantasy employees.

Twenty-one years ago, when we were house-hunting in northern Virginia, we told our real estate agent that we wanted an “older house.” So she brought us here, to a 13-year-old (at the time) center-hall colonial with a big backyard. It wasn’t exactly what we were looking for, but the older houses were closer in, smaller and more than we could afford.

Fast forward two decades. The house that once seemed new and polished is sagging and fraying. The floors creak, the windows stick and the walls, oh, they could tell you stories. We’ve finally found our “older house” in northern Virginia. It’s our own.

Three months ago our dishwasher broke, and we have yet to replace it. Sometimes when I’m scrubbing an especially crusty dish, a Cream of Wheat bowl that wasn’t immediately soaked, for instance, I ask myself why the holdup. Part of it is frugality, another part is economy (there are usually only three of us here now). But most of all, it’s because I enjoy the feel of suds up to my wrist, the squeak of a clean glass rinsed clear, the slow act of drying, always remembering the line I learned as a child from our babysitter, that a good dish dryer makes up for a bad dish washer. There is a lot of life wisdom in that line.
So even though washing dishes is a chore, especially after a long day at work, I take pleasure in the menial task. It’s tedious work that lets me think about what’s happening in my life. In that sense, it’s a lot like ironing, only the sink has a view. While swishing in the warm water, I can study the trees and measure the place of the sun in the sky. That just doesn’t happen when I load the dishwasher.

The signs all point to a day cleaning out the basement or closet or garage. It’s raining. It’s Saturday. I sat down to write in my journal this morning and was distracted by the cover of “Oprah” magazine — “De-Clutter Your Life.” There is nothing left for me to do but grab the trash bag and have at it. But wait a minute. I can write a post about de-cluttering, about how hard it is for me to do, about how many things I keep because I love the person who gave them to me. But how, when I finally make myself throw away what’s irrelevant and unused, I feel light and energetic and newly born.