Chapter 5:

HOME MATTERS

 

That first half-hour of every day is sacred to me. Perhaps it’s a throwback from all those early morning hours of writing before children were up, but if I don’t take time for a cup of coffee and reflection first thing, the day inevitably goes downhill from there. That time might include reading from a devotional, writing a letter, journaling, or—on really good days—working on an essay or book. It isn’t just the solitude I cherish, but also my surroundings.

While I no longer have a separate office, I do have my own “space,” a back room that spans the entire width of the house and serves as both bedroom and office. The bedroom portion is sparse; an end table and twin bed topped with a mockingbird quilt that matches the curtains. Outside of a washer and dryer in the opposite far corner, the rest of the large room is designed around the comfy brown recliner my children gave me for Christmas. When I sit in it to write or read, I’m surrounded by things that bring a smile to my face.

There is the Shaker-style cabinet I inherited from my mother, filled with things I treasure: my collection of autographed books, a hand-blown glass turtle my son Michael made, a toy sheep from my childhood, and bricks my daughter Rachel painted to look like the covers of my books. My grandmother’s trunk is topped by one of Mom’s quilts and her hand-carved Saint Michael statue, his sword upraised in regal glory.

Walls are adorned with paintings by my mother and daughter Emily, along with photographs taken by my son Dan, one framed and another on canvas. A rustic wooden rack is attached to one wall, the wire baskets holding stationery and greeting cards. Wooden letters with the cover designs of my six books on another wall spell the word WRITER, handmade by my daughter Elizabeth. Finally, there’s a book-themed lamp atop an end table Katie painted to look like book spines. This is the environment that inspires me to write, a constant reminder of the creative people I love.

“We need to surround ourselves and our families with objects and ideas and activities that please and excite our senses, that make us smile, that provide a soothing balm of comfort for our days,” artist Thomas Kinkade wrote in Lightposts for Living: The Art of Choosing a Joyful Life.

Evidently, from the notebooks and scrapbooks she left behind, my mother dreamed about doing just that. Dream on, she’d written on the front cover of a steno book where she’d glued pictures cut from magazines and jotted down notes, envisioning color schemes, textures, and furniture she liked. Like a vintage form of Pinterest, she’d glued pictures of fabric and wood project design ideas onto the pages of crude scrapbooks made from cut-down brown paper bags sewn together with yarn. Was “dream on” also her way of acknowledging the unlikelihood of ever acquiring those things? The sad irony was that until the last year of her life, when my sisters and I painted her walls with the colors she’d long desired, she’d only dreamt of having the woodsy moss, brown, and other hues of nature in her surroundings. She couldn’t afford a redecorating project otherwise. Still, she’d managed to incorporate many of the art and craft projects she’d envisioned into touches of beauty in our simple home.

Mom was the epitome of the word homemaker, literally “making a home” in the apartments and houses wherever we lived. She embraced the domestic skills of sewing, baking, quilting, soapmaking, and canning produce from the gardens my father tended. She seemed to have a natural flair for color and design that she later applied to her painting and wood carving.

While much of the craft work my mother accomplished early on in marriage was utilitarian—rag rugs that covered areas of old linoleum, patchwork quilts that kept her family warm at night, toddler denim jumpers designed from a worn-out skirt—other crafts were strictly beautifying, like the bright scraps of extra material, buttons, and burlap bags she transformed into colorful wall hangings. Mom wouldn’t waste even the smallest piece of fabric, using worn material or pantyhose to stuff a rag doll, cast-off woolen coats for teddy bear bodies, and extra quilted material for Christmas stockings with our names embroidered on the front.

Apparently, I hadn’t inherited my mother’s flair for color and design. The girl who’d skipped home economics classes for art and drama did not take up knitting or sewing when she got married. As two college students struggling to make ends meet, a serious lack of funds meant our home décor was more of an “early morning garage sale” theme.

That didn’t change much after I abandoned the pursuit of a master’s degree in family services to care for my own growing family. By 1988, as the mother of four children, my creative bent was aimed at writing, not homemaking, though I certainly became adept at combining sale prices with coupons, holding reign as the local coupon queen for many years. Less than ten years later, in 1996, we had six children and I’d added homeschooling and a home business to an already full life. An article I had published that year in the now-defunct Home Education magazine was aptly titled “The Messy Homeschooler.”

I rarely invited anyone over; my home was always in disarray. A photograph from that year reveals that a visitor stepping into my house would have been greeted by the sight of a large wooden desk overflowing with the detritus of my lifestyle. Every inch of the desktop was filled: small bins held carefully organized refund forms and premium offers with corresponding proofs of purchase clipped to them, stacks of coupon inserts lay waiting to be clipped, carefully compiled lists of books I sold as a home business were ready to be folded and stuffed into envelopes. Boxes of books to be priced surrounded the desk, with piles sorted for mailing on top of those. In one picture, a canister of baby powder is perched on a pile of books, a baby carrier visible in the corner of the photo. This was my reality: the house where I juggled babies, bills, and business.

I’d consult my dog-eared copy of Peg Bracken’s The I Hate to Housekeep Book or the self-proclaimed Slob Sister team in Sidetracked Home Executives for housekeeping hints. I desperately craved a well-organized space, a semblance of control over my house. I’d read every home organization article and book I could get my hands on, intent on getting my house in order. But for all the books I read back then, all the bins and baskets I’d purchased, I resembled the before version of the Slob Sisters more than I cared to admit.

At the same time, I was drawn to books like Alexandra Stoddard’s Living a Beautiful Life, enamored with her descriptions of what a home should look like, how it should reflect its inhabitants. Ours did; it was a magnificently messy house full of imaginative children. While my heart desired control, our lifestyle invited chaos.

Like my mother before me, I still managed to find small, inexpensive ways to incorporate color into our home: a coat of fresh paint would do wonders for a boring white wall, a garage sale scenic picture brought the beauty of nature inside. Moving my work desk to a corner of the dining room meant visitors wouldn’t immediately be greeted by the sight. Decorative baskets filled every corner, a valiant attempt to contain the overflow of toys and books. That was the extent of what we could afford in the way of redecorating. Photos taken in my parents’ home in 1967 revealed much the same, with holes in the linoleum and torn fabric on the arms of chairs. Though they did little to disguise the obvious poverty, the braided rugs and colorful wall hangings went a long way in making the house feel like a home. The biggest difference was that my mother had handcrafted the bright spots in the dinginess of her poverty while I acquired mine at garage sales and thrift stores.

“The home we have right now can be perfect for us in this season. It’s where we can find joy growing in our ability to manage and beautify what we have in a way that reflects who we are today,” Melissa Michaels says in Love the Home You Have. “Art is a process. And like anything beautiful and worthwhile in this world, it takes time.”

Simple functionality fit our needs during that season of life. We had food on the table, comfortable furniture, end tables that were happily and haphazardly strewn with books—along with half a dozen bookshelves filled with more—and plentiful paper and craft materials. My children were well-clothed, thanks to the bartering I did with the books I sold as a home business. They were fed, warm, and relatively happy. In the end, that’s what really mattered.

By the year 2000, when our seventh child, Katie, was born, we’d moved to a house in the country and our finances had improved slightly. I attempted some rudimentary redecorating then, cobbling together a rose-themed bathroom and a bright apple kitchen in our rental home. I discovered ways to make a room feel cozier: a pretty comforter on a bed or a pop of color from a pillow. A separate office where I could stash much of the home business and homeschooling paraphernalia meant more room for hosting family get-togethers, my larger house becoming a gathering place. My home was a work in progress as I raised young children.

When we purchased our first house in 2008, I began systematically acquiring pieces of furniture, pillows, wall hangings, and curtains that matched, in colors and designs that brought me pleasure. Yearly tax refunds funded home improvement projects like new countertops and floor tiles for the kitchen.

Either I was a late bloomer or I’d just been too busy raising a family and struggling to make ends meet to make home decorating a priority before that. Author Eileen M. Clegg would likely agree it was the latter.

“Each person has a unique creative sensibility, but that can so easily become buried beneath the stresses and responsibilities of adult life. Sometimes a reawakening slowly occurs by one taking hold of a thread of something that’s linked to something that remains pure inside each of us, a longing for expression, safe from the judgements or order imposed by the external world,” Clegg writes in Claiming Your Creative Self.

My “reawakening” seemed to begin with my mother’s cancer diagnosis, when I purchased a large rustic “LIVE” sign. Yes, there was the underlying message that I desperately wanted my mother to live. Yet, watching her face death so bravely, I was struck with a renewed sense of just how precious life is. I’ll never forget Mom’s smile when she spotted the sign hanging in my entryway or her apparent approval of the decoration and the message.

That simple wooden plaque was just the beginning in a series of steps to surround myself with color and comfort during a bleak time. Of course, I needed to paint the wall before I hung it up, and the new color led to replacing other pictures, which then required new drapes to match. It helped that I was working part time at my sister’s consignment store then, so I had the opportunity to experiment with my sense of style using the wide variety of household decorations consignors brought in.

Shortly after Mom died, I purchased a matching “DREAM” sign, daring to dream I could honor her life through utilizing my talents.

That’s exactly what I did the following year, by deciding to take my writing seriously and, as my husband so aptly worded it, began “flying and soaring” in my creative endeavors. When David died in 2012, I entered a period I can only describe as a dark night of the soul. Having lost the person I loved most in the world, I clung to writing and journaling like a lifeline, instinctively nesting in a pile of papers and books on the couch where I spent most of those first few weeks, occasionally glancing up from my frenzied writing to reflect on the meaning behind those two words on my walls: live and dream.

“Our immediate environment is one large part of our lives we can control. How we nurture our lives through the choices we make about where we live; the mood, spirit, and energy of our house; the rooms we decorate and occupy; the food we eat; the rituals we perform; the clothes we wear; and the colors we select to uplift us, make up approximately half of our happiness,” Alexandra Stoddard writes in Choosing Happiness: Keys to a Joyful Life. “If we can improve our well-being by 50 percent, we should concentrate at least that much of our efforts on our external world, the one world we occupy by ourselves, the place where we live.”

Whatever the season of your life, the home is the perfect place to begin practicing creativity. When opening our minds to the possibilities of what we can accomplish with our creative sensibilities, we need to address the physical space we inhabit, to make it conducive to inspiration. Surrounding ourselves with things we love contributes to our happiness and creativity.

Too many “things,” on the other hand, can do the opposite.

According to a March 2014 Los Angeles Times article, the average US household contains 300,000 objects, from paper clips to ironing boards. That’s a lot of “stuff.” And, while I somehow managed to create amid clutter during those early years of parenting, there’s no doubt that messy desk area contributed to my stress level. I was a much more productive writer once my children were older (and less messy) and my office area didn’t serve double duty as a playroom too.

A March 2012 article on PsychologyToday.com cites seven reasons why messy rooms contribute to higher levels of stress hormones in our bodies. Clutter bombards our minds with excessive stimuli, distracts us, makes it difficult to relax, causes anxiety and feelings of guilt and embarrassment, inhibits our creativity and productivity, frustrates us when we need to locate something, and, finally, something I always considered was the very definition of motherhood, constantly signals to our brains that our work is never done.

Marie Kondo, founder of the acclaimed KonMari Method and author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy, suggests discarding everything in the house that doesn’t bring joy.

“Hold each thing you own in your hands and ask yourself whether or not it sparks joy,” Kondo advises. “Then cherish the ones that you decide to keep, just as you cherish yourself, so that every day of your life will be filled with joy.”

“When you wear and surround yourself with the things you love, your house becomes your own personal paradise,” Kondo claims. In the thick of writing this book, I read both her books and a lively little tome called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson. The author, self-described as somewhere between “eighty and one hundred,” discusses death cleaning, or döstädning in Sweden. The term describes removing unnecessary things to make your home nice and orderly, saving heirs from a mess to deal with after you are gone.

“It is a word that is used when you or someone else does a good, thorough cleaning and gets rid of things to make life easier and less crowded. It does not necessarily have to do with your age or death, but often does,” Magnusson writes. “Sometimes you just realize that you can hardly close your drawers or barely shut your closet door. When that happens, it is definitely time to do something, even if you are only in your thirties.”

“Death cleaning is not about dusting or mopping up; it is about a permanent form of organization that makes your everyday life run more smoothly,” she adds.

Facing an upcoming move in the spring of 2018 seemed an ideal time to streamline my own 300,000 possessions, putting into practice the advice I’d garnered from both decluttering gurus. It would be impossible to fit all the “stuff” from my four-bedroom, two-story home into a house with less than 760 square feet. I had to be brutal in the downsizing.

I started in my office, touching each item as I asked myself if it brought me joy or would fit in my smaller space. Did I really need two vintage blue Royal typewriters for display, or was one enough? What about wooden chess and checker sets that for the past ten years had hung on the wall gathering dust? My huge oak desk had to go and my desktop computer with it. I sold two solid oak bookshelves, weeding my book collection from over a thousand books to just those that would fit in the top two shelves of the vintage cabinet I was determined to take with me. Call it what you will, KonMari or death cleaning; in a purging frenzy inexplicably timed within thirty days of the deadline for this book, I got rid of half of my possessions, holding two garage sales and carting leftovers to the local thrift shop. In one final heartbreaking moment, I made the decision to give away my mother’s table. There was no getting around it: my new kitchen barely had room for the small IKEA folding table the previous owner left for me.

My sister Angie lightened my load of sadness over the loss by joking it was now a “traveling table,” going from one sister to the next as the need arose. Mom’s table had come to me when this book idea was ignited. Angie picked up the table the same week I submitted the completed manuscript. It had served its purpose—it was time to let it go.

Though few readers will require getting rid of half their possessions in their quest for a more creative life, now might be the perfect time to address some clutter that may be inhibiting creativity and robbing you of joy.

 

“The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.”

—THOMAS MOORE

 

IGNITE

In the 1970s, my older sisters called them “Dust-Catcher Meetings,” gathering at a friend or neighbor’s home to trade things they no longer needed: magazines, paperback books, and decorative knick-knacks. Years later, my sisters and nieces occasionally met at my mother’s house to do the same thing. My monthly lifelong learners group initially included a swap table, where craft materials, magazines, and household items could be traded with other members. Swapping items you no longer use is a “green thing,” with community or private upcycling and recycling swap events taking off all over the county. Your challenge is to organize a swap party around something you find cluttering your home. Of course, this means your ultimate goal is to give more than you receive and donate anything left after the swap. You are defeating the purpose if you end up trading one material item for another. The idea is that by organizing this swap, you’ll make a dent in your own clutter.

Use this handy checklist to organize your swap party:

• Choose your swap theme: What will you be trading? Do you have too many books taking up shelf space? Try a book swap. Want to purge your closet space? A clothing swap might be in order. Kitchen utensils, jewelry, purses; it’s all fair game for swapping, and the swap can always be general household.

• Send out invitations: Who will you invite? Office mates? Friends? Church members? Your book club? You might want to try a smaller group your first time. Ten is manageable. For clothing swaps, you’ll want similar sizes so everyone has something to choose from, but if you include purses and jewelry, then size isn’t quite as important. Obviously, your book club would be interested in swapping books. It might be fun to send out paper invites, but you can always set up a private Facebook event or group too. If you set up a Facebook group, entice invited guests with pictures of the loot you have to trade. What says “party” more than a great purse?

• Set the ground rules: Nothing bigger than a bread box is a good rule. No electronics or non-working items. No opened makeup. Clothing must be clean and free of stains or tears. Determine how many things each person can bring and how many they can take home. Since your purpose is to declutter, I wouldn’t put a limit on how much leaves the house, but do take turns to make it fair, or one woman might grab all the purses and shoes and someone else be left with six pairs of sweatpants. Make it clear that unchosen items must be taken back home, but be prepared to take a load to your local thrift shop the next day regardless. If you were willing to swap it, you don’t need it anymore. Get rid of it.

• Arrange the swapping area: Clear space, like your dining room table or the couch, for displaying the wares. Borrow some folding tables or a clothing rack if you need to. Serve refreshments. A tray of crackers, cheese, and fruit is always a big hit. Or make it a potluck, with everyone bringing a dish to share. They can even bring their contribution in a dish they’re willing to swap!

• Have fun! You may find you want to do this on a regular basis. Someone’s trash really is someone else’s treasure.