Miriam appeared in our kitchen at six that April morning before the carpenters arrived. She had come to make a last-ditch effort to dissuade us from tearing down the wall that separated the kitchen from the small, spare room that over the years had been used first for dining and later as a spare bedroom.
“I’m urging you to build out, not tear down. It’s not too late,” she said, as if speaking a truth that, once grasped, we’d be unable to contest.
We had done the figuring and made the mistake of telling her it would cost roughly the same to add on as to tear out and remodel. To her way of thinking, the choice was obvious. Why not gain additional square footage for the same money? More was better. Why not leave the downstairs as it was with two guest bedrooms? That was always handy when a crowd appeared.
We thought of the time Wanda’s father and sister were here visiting along with Frank’s friend from college, his wife, and his toddler son. Housing all five called for three guest rooms, and since we only had two, Jane ended up stretched out on a sleeping bag in Wanda’s porch-office.
For a moment we wondered if Miriam weren’t right. After all, she had spent forty-six years in this house, thousands of hours in the kitchen, many of them fantasizing about ways she would do the place over if she could. It was touching that she cared enough to climb out of bed so early that morning and warn us against the big mistake she was sure we were making.
Still, her last-minute plea failed to alter our plans. We had new and different ideas for the kitchen, for the house, and for our lives. Our situation did not remotely resemble Sam and Miriam’s—nor could we imagine that it ever would. If we had children, we certainly wouldn’t have six. Nor did we have an extended family with nieces and nephews traipsing in to spend summers with us. Frank’s nieces and nephews were all but grown now, and Wanda’s only sibling hadn’t started her family yet.
We didn’t want to take care of any more square footage than we already had. Even after three years in Virginia, our living space seemed more than adequate for two people—certainly by Los Angeles-apartment standards. And we knew that the extra space would carry the hidden price tag over the years of extra work—in mopping and window washing, in dusting and maintenance.
Exactly fifty years after the house had been built in 1939 for $5,400, we plunged, with more excitement than trepidation, into its murky recesses to give it its first major overhaul. That Wanda would be the architect of our new nest, of what we hoped to transform over time into our dream home, was a challenge she’d been awaiting all her life—since girlhood when she used to sketch house plans from her apartment-bunkbed perch while other girls were doodling horses, daffodils, and cupid’s arrows.
Remodeling Frank’s boyhood home amounted to an act of reclamation, like saving a pet from a pound. We were putting into action our growing preference for reuse over expendability. And we were doing it on a piece of family history.
We met a couple at a wedding in Cleveland that year whose business it was to oversee the kind of project we were undertaking (along with more formidable ones). Their field was inner-city residential restoration. “Take an old house and make it livable,” they told us. “It may cost you the same money as building from scratch, but it costs society far less.” As we toasted our mutual friends, the newlyweds, they explained: “The infrastructure for that old house, for that whole neighborhood, is already in place. The earth has been moved. The sidewalks have been paved, and sewer lines are in place. Why extend the city and start carving up virgin land?”
They articulated an ethic that we were developing as our own: of reclamation and resource recovery, of mending and caring for things rather than throwing them out and replacing them. It is a philosophy that applies not only to houses, but to cameras, shoes, and leftover food and—we suspect there is a connection—to people.
Two carpenters walked into our lives one April evening after work and stayed for hours, talking excitedly about the prospective job of transforming our kitchen into a large expanse that swept from the north end of the house to the south. Paul Everts, a tall, sturdily built man with curly blond hair and blue eyes behind tinted, wire-rim glasses, had come highly recommended by friends for whom he’d worked. He brought along with him Victor Hawks, a featherweight carpenter originally from Carroll County with a high-pitched, hair-trigger laugh.
They had met, we soon learned, at a local Christian businessmen’s association and were straight as T squares. They didn’t smoke, drink, or take the Lord’s name in vain. They were happily married with wives and young children at home. They didn’t work Sundays or observe the “pagan” holiday, Halloween. Best of all for Wanda, who planned to write in her porch-office during this renovation period, they didn’t feel it was a necessary tool of the trade to play loud music while hammering and sawing.
One of the friends who had recommended Paul told us that he had made his own inquiries about us. Of Wanda he wanted to know, “How come she didn’t take the name Levering?” And he elicited her help in practicing to pronounce “Urbanska.”
We had just returned from a trip west and had expected to get the ball rolling on tracking down and interviewing good carpenters—a process we figured might take months. We thought hours would be devoted to mulling over and refining the rough plans Wanda had sketched up.
Instead, working on a late-night bag of soft-batter, chocolate-chip cookies with these two men, we were faced with making an immediate decision. Paul was fixing to leave the area. Having lived in Carroll County for several years, he believed better opportunities awaited him in a more populous part of the state. He would be here only another month—or, at best, two. If we wanted him, we had to grab him now. Our kitchen would be his last job here.
We didn’t like the sound of that. If ours was Paul’s last job here, what would he care if the sanding were uneven or the cabinets crooked? He wouldn’t be around to take the flak if things fell apart. He wouldn’t need our seal of approval for future references. And if he was eager to get moving on his new life, wouldn’t he likely cut corners to get things done expeditiously? Even worse, might he tear us down and leave us holding the proverbial bag, this time in the chaos of deconstruction?
All these doubts seemed legitimate, but standing there before us, soberly studying Wanda’s plan, Paul Everts didn’t remotely resemble the kind of guy who would do that to you. He quizzed us about materials and put a rough, don’t-quote-me-on-it price of ten thousand dollars on the whole job, including putting in new flooring, subflooring, and wallboard in the downstairs bathroom, along with a tub surround and other needed work. Paul and Victor would work on an hourly basis—ten dollars each—so they were not, they made clear, bound to that preliminary estimate.
We blinked when Paul threw out the ten-thousand-dollar figure, as that was precisely what we had to work with, no more, no less. If it went over, our budget would be depleted and the work halted. We couldn’t quibble with their rates. Good carpenters were high, even in a part of the country where some adults still made the minimum wage. And those prices sounded reasonable against what we’d pay in a city. What worried us was the conventional wisdom about remodeling—which held that if you’re given an estimate, double it. And here we not only didn’t have an estimate, we had a guess—and only a hunch for security that these guys might be as good as or better than their word.
Seeing our hesitation, Paul turned on what for him was the hard sell. “At that price, I’m a bargain,” he said with conviction.
We talked it over and called him the next day. “We’ll do it,” we said.
When we moved into the brick house in April of 1986, major house renovations, though out of reach for the moment, were very much on our minds. You couldn’t quibble with the amount of space we were getting. In addition to the living room, kitchen, and two baths, the house had four bedrooms upstairs and two downstairs. We designated two upstairs bedrooms as side-by-side offices. The largest bedroom became ours. This left a small upstairs bedroom, last occupied by Frank during his summer vacations from college, which Wanda dubbed “Frank-boy’s room” (after John-boy Walton). It was underused, its only function serving as a giant catchall closet.
Despite the number of rooms, the house added up to just two thousand square feet of living space, minus the basement. As was the style in 1939 when the house was built, most of the rooms were small, boxy, and closetless. Wanda was determined to remake the house in our image.
Between the time we moved in, in April 1986, and the start of the kitchen renovation in April 1989, we tackled several small projects. The first was our bedroom. We covered the bare walls with fresh paint and pink-and-gray wallpaper. A local seamstress custom-made curtains for the three windows for twenty-five dollars, and we bought an area carpet at a remnant shop in Mount Airy for less than it would have cost to refinish the floors. From there we moved on to the basement, where with the help of a carpenter friend we converted a giant playroom into an office both for orchard paperwork and for writing. We spread gallons of white paint over the first floor: the guest room, the hallway, the stairwell, and the living room ceiling. And for the first time ever, the eight dark wooden doors and frames—a visual disturbance in the narrow front entry hall—were painted white. We sanded most of the downstairs oak floors and laid down several coats of polyurethane. Our last job before the kitchen was spackling and painting lilac Frank’s small upstairs office, formerly his parents’ bedroom.
The kitchen renovation represented a more serious claim on our time, money, and energy than any of our earlier projects. It was also an important emotional turning point in our relationship with the house, as if by putting our creative imprint on the place we were somehow laying permanent claim to it. And under our plan, Polonius would have nothing on us: we were neither borrowers nor lenders. Further, the fact that as two writers living outside a major communications center we were doing well enough to underwrite an entire kitchen renovation was a real source of pride.
On the last Friday in April, Paul and Victor arrived for their first day of work. They had instructed us in advance to empty the kitchen cabinets and to move every sponge, cleanser can, dust mop, and stick of furniture from the kitchen into the living room. In fact, we were in a last-minute scramble to carry out their orders when Miriam showed up to offer her eleventh-hour appeal.
We set up a makeshift kitchen in the living room, opening out the leaves of the dining room table and, for protection, covering it with a flannel-backed plastic tablecloth. As if for an extended picnic, Wanda set out what she guessed would be enough dishes, glasses, and mugs to last the duration of the remodel, which Paul had estimated would not be longer than three weeks. She added a few often-used spices, such as pepper and garlic powder, and stood the silverware upright in mugs to save table space. We moved the refrigerator next to the table and scattered dining room chairs around the house.
Since we were without a functioning stove or oven, Frank unearthed a hot plate from the bowels of the basement. But we soon discovered it took close to fifty minutes to bring a full pot of water to boil, so we transferred our allegiance to “refrigerator food”—sandwiches, fruit, and frozen meals that could be heated in the toaster oven. Our usual pasta dinners were reserved for those rare nights when we could wait an hour to boil noodles. After some debate we purchased our first microwave oven and became overnight converts, zapping our desk “companions”—cups of coffee, hot chocolate, hot cider, and surprisingly good hot orange juice.
Lacking a functioning kitchen sink, we tried to use dishes judiciously. We washed things out in the small downstairs lavatory sink, stretching out a dish towel over the toilet lid to air-dry them. Dishwashing in the bathroom wasn’t a particularly appetizing venture—especially after the plaster walls and wallboard began coming down and bits of dislodged material were scattered everywhere. We made frequent use of flimsy paper plates held stiff by wicker liners. Though we were roughing it indoors, we didn’t mind it much, given the magical transformation that was starting to take place.
Once we gave our carpenters the go-ahead, Wanda threw herself into the project while Frank worked in the orchard, preparing for the 1989 harvest season. The idea was to keep the kitchen as simple and homey as possible while upgrading its efficiency and eye appeal. And we wanted a kitchen that was as maintenance free as possible. We tried to bear in mind not only what we needed and wanted today, but what we—or the next occupants—might want forty or fifty years down the line. Wanda made phone calls and entered product information into an old reporters’ notebook. She scoured back issues of magazines for photographs of the look she wanted and stapled them into a three-ring notebook. An artful use of wooden ceiling beams (which in our case could cover major ceiling cracks) caught her eye, as did a clever microwave shelf that held the appliance off the counter while blending in with the lines of the kitchen cabinets.
Wanda sketched in greater detail the plan she’d roughed out earlier. Since the sink’s position was fixed (we left it where it was in order not to alter the plumbing lines), we placed the stove down the counter from the sink and the refrigerator directly opposite the stove. Basically the kitchen consisted of two parallel counters that extended north-south along the side of the house. At the north side, perpendicular to the counters, we planned a window seat that would open up for tool storage. On each side of the window seat were bookshelves, always at a premium in our house. In the giant new room there would be nine windows, with light streaming in from the north, south, and west. On the south side of the room was space for the dining table and chairs. On the east side would be our main source of heat, a wood-burning stove, along with a shallow broom closet and pantry.
“To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated in knowledge of simplicity,” Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in The Natural House. Following Wright’s observation, we wanted to avoid mindless purchases and decorative frills. We nixed adding a garbage disposal, for instance, because we kept a compost pail for scraps under our sink. Initially Wanda wanted to keep rather than replace the curvilinear 1939 sink—because she liked its vintage look and because she thought that every good room, like a wedding ensemble, should include something old along with something new. The sink’s intransigent stains could be dispensed with by the fresh enamel of a local porcelain refinisher. In this case, however, Miriam argued convincingly that it would be a false economy to keep the old, one-basin sink, as deeper double basins were frequently desirable.
The dishwasher question was trickier to resolve. If we wanted one, now was the time to write it into the script, as built-in dishwashers were far more desirable than roll-around portables. But we weren’t sure we wanted one. Having survived nine years of domestic life without one, we’d found dishwashing was as often a pleasurable exercise for us as a pesky nuisance—though we couldn’t deny the not infrequent sin of procrastination, where piles of dirty dishes accumulated in and around the sink. Still, was it really necessary to bring a loud, noisy, obtrusive appliance into our lives? If not here, where would we draw the simple-living line?
Ellen Hoffs, a friend from Los Angeles who’d visited the previous year with her husband, happened to call at a critical moment of debate. When Wanda laid out the pros and cons of having a dishwasher, Ellen offered her wisdom about its advantages when entertaining. “Dishwashers are very good to have when company is over,” she said. We realized then that others might not view our piles of dishes as indulgently as we did, and since we seemed unlikely to reform (and since overnight guests were an important ingredient of our social life in the country), we decided to bite the bullet and buy a Maytag. We were happy to learn, some months after our purchase, that dishwashers actually use less hot water (and therefore less electricity) than does washing by hand with a continuously running tap.
The decision about the flooring was easier, though no less challenging. The floors of the two conjoined rooms were different: the old guest room, like the rest of the house, was oak, but the kitchen floor was pine, chosen for its reputed water resistance. The oak had weathered the years better than the pine, which had soaked in grease stains from the stove and from glue dribbling into the cracks where linoleum had been laid in the 1940s. No amount of sanding would remove these greenish black stains marching down the floor in north-south rows.
Instead of covering the whole thing with a unifying piece of vinyl flooring (new wood was out of our budget), we decided to stick with what we had, warts and all. We pickled the oak floor light and pickled the lighter pine dark. Although, in the end, the stains were only partially obscured by the pickling, the eye unites the two and gets the impression of a seasoned floor, leaving us satisfied. Nonetheless one visitor who saw the kitchen several months after its completion blurted out, “When are you going to get to the floor?”
Our hearts were not set on custom-built cabinets—not until Wanda checked out the prefab units and, except for the most expensive ones, found them all to be at least partially constructed of particleboard. Although many had attractive fronts, we did not think board would wear well, that it would warp if it came into contact with water or might break if a nail was driven into it with too much force. It seemed pointless to tear out our functional (albeit unsightly) wood cabinets and replace them with something destined not to last.
Wanda interviewed several custom cabinetmakers, but either their prices were too high or they wouldn’t build what we wanted. Then, ten days into the remodel, Joe Dalton stepped through our permanently ajar door. An amiable, graying man who always dressed in a tan uniform even though he was working for himself, he had driven over from Woolwine, an apple-growing community about forty miles to the east of us. Tape in hand, he took down the dimensions and pencil-marked the wall where the appliances and cabinets would stand.
“Could the cabinets measure thirty-eight inches high rather than the standard thirty-six?” Wanda asked timidly, having been chastened for such heresy by one previous candidate. All our lives we tall folk have stooped over kitchen counters built for the average-size, five-foot-four-inch American woman. At five ten and six one, we simply didn’t fit.
“I don’t see any reason why not,” Joe answered merrily, seeming to relish the challenge.
Emboldened, Wanda asked if it would be possible to build the cabinets all the way to the ceiling, to avoid either adding dead, dust-collecting space above the cabinets or boxing in usable space.
“Whatever the lady wants,” Joe said, meaning it. What’s more, he would have the cabinets ready by next week.
Joe Dalton proved true to his word. He completed the unfinished, three-quarter-inch birch plywood cabinets with plain fronts and installed them by early the next week, having taken eight days from the time we first met him until he nailed the units to the walls. The bill he presented was two-thirds that of even the cheapest prefab cabinets. Wanda was so delighted that she wrote Joe a gift certificate for a free bucket of pick-your-own cherries.
For all our economies and lucky breaks, we splurged on two fronts. One was the kitchen counter, for which we chose tile instead of the standard Formica. Although the price difference was significant—three times as much—and though we were advised to put on the factory-cut countertop for now and replace it with tile at some later date, we ordered exactly the counter we wanted: large, chunky, off-white tiles from Florida. They added another half inch to our counter height and considerably more to the aesthetics of the new room. And they obviated the need for trivets; you could set a hot pot anywhere.
Our other major extravagance was the stone hearth that we added to the space where previously there had been only a chimney-flue opening above narrow broom closets. Stone-masonry work was one of Paul Everts’s specialties, and though we hesitated to commission it, in the end we gave him the green light, reasoning that it was better to do any work now that we might want done later. For several days in early evenings after work, Frank led Wanda on rock-hunting expeditions through our woods and orchards. Though quartz and metamorphic schist rocks glittering with mica were abundant, finding the right specimen—the rock to live with for a lifetime—proved exacting. We wanted stones that were light in weight and color, attractive to the eye, and as flat as possible. We trudged through patches of forest and dug through the rock piles scattered throughout the orchards, where over the years fields had been cleared and rocks heaped. Once home, we scrubbed years of dirt off the rocks, using an old toothbrush to reach into the cracks.
It’s a primitive, homey hearth, on an eleven-inch, stone-masonry platform. Per Wanda’s suggestion, Paul laid a large flat stone to jut out from the wall as a natural mantel. The hearth is composed solely of native rocks, except for one—a rounded, sea-washed stone that Wanda and her mother collected from a public beach in Connecticut the summer they drove the Malibu down from Maine.
With amusement, Paul recounted that one day Garnet Dawson came in from the orchard to size up the progress. Shaking his head in dismay, Garnet told him, “I’d leave those rocks out in the woods where they belong. Wouldn’t you?”
Paul’s reply was vintage Appalachian. “Some would,” he observed.
Our biggest jolt came—though not without warning—when Paul announced that he was leaving after three weeks, before the job was finished. It was upsetting, of course, but we had to make the best of it. With only Victor working on the job, progress slowed considerably.
May turned to June, when we expected not only the usual bustle of cherry-picking season, but extended visits from Marie and an actress friend from California. We were still eating on paper plates, with no functioning kitchen, sink, or stove. We felt no small embarrassment when a visiting United States congressman from southwestern Virginia and his administrative assistant arrived at his old pal Sam’s door at lunchtime. Culinarily crippled without Miriam—who was visiting her sister in North Carolina—to serve as hostess, Sam brought the distinguished guests to our house, where the congressman was forced to share the couch with a set of wrenches and balance his lunch plate on his lap.
Paul had put in long hours, occasionally staying till midnight to finish a job; but left to his own devices, Victor adopted another approach, more in line with the reputation enjoyed by free-lance carpenters. He started taking on other projects, juggling jobs and showing up for only one or two hours a day, sometimes not at all.
We started getting desperate to clear the debris from our house and yard and put our lives back to normal. The downstairs commode had been sitting in our front lawn for weeks. Wanda called in a local fix-it service, which sent over three men one day. In a hurry they built a small pantry and hooked up the sink and dishwasher, along with tackling myriad other jobs. For three days running, after work at the packhouse, Wanda polyurethaned the kitchen cabinets. At last the end was in sight. When the final tile was laid in July, eleven weeks had passed. Although the carpenters had grossly underestimated the time, at least one part of the initial promise held true: the money. Incredibly, after all this work, all these men, and lo these many weeks, with custom cabinets, tiles and masonry, two new major appliances, a ceiling fan, and bathroom repair, the tab came in under budget. We had spent just under $9,500.
The renovation forced us to take stock of what we had and to do some serious deck shuffling. Having no place in the new kitchen, we had to move the copier machine, a former occupant of the small downstairs guest room, to Wanda’s upstairs porch office. The mirrored armoire, a gift from Sam and Miriam when we moved in, found its new home in the remaining downstairs guest room. Frank suggested moving Cholla and Winnie’s bowls to the basement landing, a move Wanda resisted initially on the grounds that she got a kick out of watching the cats eat. In the end she had to concede that the mess of scattered cat food, like so many brick shavings, was better left to the imagination—and the cellar landing—than to our refinished kitchen floor. Twin beds that had come with the house were returned to the senior Leverings. And the list went on.
Rearranging the inside of our house helped us create a warm new environment. Though we had remodeled just one quarter of the house, the desire to streamline and make it more livable spilled over onto the entire spread. We began to draw up lists of future projects: redoing the upstairs bathroom, turning Frank-boy’s room into a respectable guest room, and embarking on a thorough purging of the basement and attic—two areas that remained cluttered with detritus from Sam and Miriam’s regime.
Changing the status quo of the house helped us lay claim as a couple to what had hitherto been Frank’s parents’ home. Hovering over us for several years after we’d moved to the orchard was the idea, held by some family members, that our commitment to the place was shallow, that one day we might just pack up and leave. But the dramatic and costly changes we had made seemed to lay to rest that idea once and for all.
Still, there was ambivalence from several of Frank’s siblings, who, protective of their youthful memories, weren’t sure they liked us mucking around with their childhood home. One vigorously protested painting over any natural woodwork. Another came to gaze wistfully at the spot where she was born, now a kitchen counter.
Sam and Miriam had been wonderful—not only about surrendering the house to us, but turning over its emotional custody as well (Miriam’s advice about the placement of the kitchen notwithstanding). By and large Miriam applauded the changes and became so entranced with the transformation that she frequently dropped in to watch the workmen plaster, paint, and mortar. And Sam, never one to take any interest in décor, was too oblivious of the goings-on to offer any objection.
The more the place became ours, the more attentive we became to it and to the things inside it. We were living more consciously, more fully, in the physical world of our house. Ironically, while simple livers are often linked with antimaterialism, we found that things themselves had become more real, more intrinsically meaningful, to us.
Smaller things commanded our attention, like the shower curtain in the downstairs bathroom. No one could deny that it was hanging on by three hooks and its fingernails, the rest of the holes having ripped through the plastic. It was only a matter of time before the whole shebang would give way. It was the kind of thing that in the past we would have let go of until we threw our hands in the air, purchased a replacement, and tossed the old curtain in the garbage. Although neither of us would accept responsibility for yanking on the curtain with force sufficient to rip it from its rings, this time, instead of pointing fingers, we rounded up a paper punch and salvaged the curtain with new holes.
Mending and caring became our new catchwords. We began taking shoes to the shoemaker for new soles and heels, despite the fact that the money expended would have gone a long way toward buying a new pair. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that we already owned the shoes; and except for the soles, they were perfectly decent. An ethic of conservation about the things in our home was taking root.
Once committed to taking better care of our belongings, most of us are forced to do some paring down. Few can better testify to the salubrious, therapeutic, and even spiritual side effects of streamlining one’s possessions than Sue Garrett Rickert, a tall, bespectacled woman of fifty. Frank has known Sue, a family friend, since childhood. Now living in San Francisco, where she’s a wife and mother of three, she spends much of her spare time doing hospital volunteer work.
More than once throughout her life, Sue has shorn herself of impedimenta—the way others embark upon fasts—to refocus priorities while achieving a state of detachment. Sue, who was raised Episcopalian, says her spiritual life took a profound turn when she acted upon a dream. At the time, she was a young elementary school teacher in Lynchburg, Virginia. During that period, the civil rights movement was rumbling throughout the South.
In Sue’s dream she “saw an ad in the newspaper, in the classified advertising section,” she said, recalling that watershed dream of almost three decades ago. “It was offering to give away twelve to fourteen dresses. At the end, my name was given and my phone number. The next morning, I woke up and jotted down the dream. I called the newspaper and gave them the ad word for word. I got one call the next day from a woman saying, ‘You are the answer to prayer. We’re on welfare, and my husband has broken his back. We live out in the country and have no source of income. We will come right over.’ The mother and three teenaged girls drove over in this old, beaten-up truck, on Saturday night—the night before Easter—and came in and tried on everything I had put out: dresses, purses, shoes. They took everything.”
After giving away her clothing, Sue felt so lighthearted that she decided to expand her offering to household items. She took out a second ad and emptied her apartment.
“Now I was totally free,” she said. “I felt I could go anywhere I wanted to go and do anything I wanted to do. I was totally free in spirit.”
And so she did. She took a leave of absence from school and set out alone to travel for six months in Switzerland. Her European trip led to a two-year stint with the Peace Corps in Tanzania, where she taught in one of two girls’ schools in that country.
“Giving away my clothes—that small step of following the leading I had,” said Sue, “had a huge effect which I did not know then. I did not know what a transforming life experience that would be, so crucial to all the things that were to occur afterward.”
When they learned about her giveaways, Sue’s family, who lived in nearby Roanoke, began to worry. Their concern mounted when Sue announced her decision to enter the Peace Corps. She remembers her mother reading her the riot act: “ ‘Susan, you are twenty-four. This is the time you should be catching a man. If you wait two years and get out of the mainstream of things, you’ll never catch a man’ ” Sue laughed. “Mom was wrong; I caught two!”
The first of her two husbands was a fellow Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania. As we talked, Sue pulled out photographs of this most romantic part of her past. “This is a picture of the dining room,” she said. “They had no china or utensils for eating. They ate with their hands. Everybody carried everything on their heads there. … The amazing thing to me was how easy it was, how much more satisfying it was and uncluttered. When I was there I thought, This is as near to paradise as I’ll ever be. I’m so free and unencumbered with things and litter, the kind that distract our minds. … I was surprised that I didn’t have culture shock when I went into that environment. When I first saw the village, it seemed more natural to me than it did when I came back to the United States.”
Today Sue lives in a comfortable two-story house in San Francisco’s Saint Francis Woods district with her second husband, Tom Rickert, and her three children. Tom’s two college-age kids come in for vacations and holidays. The house—which was awarded to her in the divorce settlement from her first marriage—is spacious with a full furnished basement and plenty of attic room.
Coincidentally, when we saw her, Sue had just completed the latest of her cathartic purges. Still following the leading of her dreams, Sue said, “Before Christmas I woke up two or three times to the Shaker tune ‘ ’Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free…’
“I’m always conscious of the happiness I had living [in Tanzania] without anything material for two years. I’m haunted by how happy I was. I’m also trapped in a cultural milieu where it’s understood that in order to function you must have some of these things. I’m trying to get down to: What do we really need? How many chairs? How many tables? What is the bottom line of how we can function?”
The week before we saw her, Sue had ordered a huge dumpster to be dropped by her house. “Within the space of three days, I filled the entire dumpster myself.” She threw away “a lot of trash, old magazines, old newspapers, toys that were broken, games with pieces missing that I knew we would never play. I gave three carloads of the children’s and my clothes to Goodwill, things we had outgrown.”
Editing down one’s holdings can be especially difficult when others, namely children, are involved.
“I did it while the children were in school almost surreptitiously, because I felt it was a private act. They did see the dumpster filling up, but they didn’t say much because it wasn’t their stuff. Their bicycles and stuffed animals are still here. This was my stuff, up in the attic and down in the storeroom and in old drawers. I’m not through yet but I’m beginning to feel the same buoyancy and lightness of spirit as when I put the ad in the newspaper so many years ago.”
“It must be hard to aspire to simple living when you have children,” Wanda said.
“Yeah. They’re always reminding me that we don’t have cable TV, that our TV is broken, that we won’t have a computer soon because Sara will take it away [to college], that we don’t have an electric typewriter, that we don’t have Nintendo.”
“How do you respond to that?” asked Wanda.
“That it’s more important to me that you have a good education, that if I have extra money, it goes into your education.”
Like Sue, we found that getting rid of clutter instead of holding on to it on the off chance that it might someday be needed was almost always liberating. During the period of the renovation and afterward, Wanda made generous donations to the Salvation Army. Boxes of seldom-used pots and pans, dishes and plates, were discarded. Grocery bags bursting with clothes, curtains, and knickknacks, were carted off.
Though we are both inveterate pack rats, parting with these things proved relatively easy. The real test lay in letting go of the things to which we were attached. The 1948 Chevy that Frank had driven to Mount Airy High School in the late sixties and 1970, which was an antique even then, with its giant lumbering doors and seats wide as twin beds and sun visor on the hood, had taken up a stall in the car shed without seeing any road action for close to two decades. Though no one here knew enough mechanics to put in the new engine and transmission it needed, no one wanted to let go of the car either. One day we’ll get it running again, Sam would say. Soon it would be a valuable antique.
So there it sat, a rusting shell of a car, occupying one of three spaces in the car shed, vines growing up the wheels and under the hood—more eyesore than antique. One day, perhaps under the spell of a Sue Rickert—like dream, Frank woke up and said, “Let’s give it away.” Losing it did not mean parting with good memories. Wanda and Miriam gave the nod. Sam was the last holdout for keeping it, but seeing the tide had turned against him, he reluctantly agreed to let it go. So it was given to Perry Haynes, a young orchardist, close friend, and ace mechanic. Delighted with the gift, Perry promised that once he got the old Chevy running, we could take it out anytime for a romantic spin on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Like Perry, we have also been recipients of gifts and know the pleasures of being on either end of the receiving line. When they visited one fall, Frank’s uncle Alton and aunt Elizabeth Smith Lindsey carted a family heirloom as a house warming gift in their silver Chevy Nova for 650 miles. It was an antique, three-drawer, walnut dresser with a heavy marble top made by Eastlake, one of the first assembly-line furniture manufacturers in America. A gem from the mid-nineteenth century, with intricate, hand-carved ornamentation over the manufactured base, the chest was passed down from his and Miriam’s mother, Lois Whitmarsh Lindsey, to UncAl (as he playfully refers to himself). Inside the top drawer, UncAl thumbtacked a short history of the piece for the sake of posterity.
When we offered thanks for this treasure and for their having gone to the trouble of delivering it, characteristically, Al and Elizabeth insisted we were doing them a favor. This self-effacing generosity surprised Wanda more than Frank, who had grown accustomed to their ways after spending the summer with them in 1974.
“We had too much in the house in the first place,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “It looked like a furniture store. The more you have, the more you have to take care of.”
It strikes us how often people look back with longing on certain times in their lives: the crowded Spartan life of college dorms; boot camp for those who’ve gone through the military; summer camp with no more than a bedroll and canteen; trips to nether regions lugging backpacks; the salad days of one’s profession before becoming encumbered by all the trappings of prestige and success. Although lost youth is most often identified as the source of this elusive pleasure, the simplicity of the life itself is usually overlooked.
We cannot hope to take our meals at a mess hall, nor do we wish to live once again in a twelve-by-ten room and bed down on squeaky cots with lumpy mattresses; but it’s always worth bearing in mind how the reduction of possessions, the streamlining of the clutter in one’s personal domain, can enhance one’s life.
Not long after the renovation of the kitchen was completed, Victor Hawks came over to put a few finishing touches on the job. He surveyed the other rooms in the house, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what remained undone, of bringing the whole place up to snuff. Back in the kitchen, leaning on a counter he had recently tiled, he turned to Wanda as Frank stood nearby.
“When you get rich,” he asked, “are you going to build you a new house?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever build a new house—not unless the bank takes this one away from us,” Wanda joked. “I like this house fine—better all the time.”
“Oh, I would if I was you,” he countered. “I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.”
“Besides,” Wanda continued, “it would be a shame to cast aside a good home. It would feel like tossing out an old friend.”
Victor looked her square in the eye and laughed as he said, “Wanda, you wouldn’t even mind working at a junk shop, would you?”
Wanda looked him back, not sure if his words were spoken in ridicule or admiration. Either way she had to admit he was right about her. She smiled broadly. “Where do I sign up, Victor?”