Clearing Cupboards

     Spring cleaning. It sounds like a good idea but I’ve never done it. There isn’t much about housecleaning that excites me, but I do love a tidy cupboard or closet. And that bit about “a place for everything and everything in its place” suits me just fine. Clutter confuses me. Seriously. So while I may drag my feet when faced with washing windows or scrubbing bathrooms, I jump at the chance to straighten shelves or have a good clear out.

     William Morris, whose designs generated the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 1900's, said, “Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” It’s a good philosophy for someone like me, and I have tried to practice it in my own home. The trouble is, there are an awful lot of beautiful and affordable chachkies out there.

     I had a garage sale last summer. It was a major purge because I am attempting to simplify. There isn't room in the house to store all of the beauties I have collected when clutter not only confuses me, it feels oppressive. Making the decision to keep or toss item after item, however, was mentally, even emotionally exhausting. In the end it was worth it; the peace of proportion was greater than the pain of purging. That, and I had a wad of cash.

     Oddly, I have discovered that my fondness for clearing cupboards also comes in handy when I write.

     I began writing a novel over twenty-five years ago. For a long time it was just a hobby, but I finally finished it a few years back. In the process of soliciting an agent I was told the book was too long for a first-time novelist. Way too long. You can accumulate a lot of words in twenty-five years. So I began snipping paragraphs and pitching pages that had taken me days and days to write. Ouch. I tried not to think of it as waste, and once I pushed through the pain, I realized that editing felt much the same as having a good clear out–I enjoy it. There is still work to be done, but the words are stacking up neatly and my sentences are looking sleek all lined up on their shelves. It won't be long before I am ready to submit my book again. Oh yes, and I'm having another garage sale this summer.

Pen Pals

     I once had a pen pal. I’ll call her Penny for the sake of her privacy. The relationship wasn’t something we planned, it began naturally at a party as we discovered our mutual passion for good literature. Before that we were acquaintances who had only exchanged the smallest of small talk. Neither of us knew many people who loved to talk about reading or writing without an ego in tow.

     Penny wrote first to say how much she had enjoyed our conversation, to share the title of a book we had talked about, and to continue the discussion we had begun at the party. In her next letter she sent me a lovely poem I had never seen. It was wonderful. She used paper, envelopes, and stamps–the real thing. I looked forward with anticipation for each new letter to arrive. I began checking the mailbox myself instead of sending someone out for it, hoping for something beyond the usual bills and advertising. When a letter came I was so greedy I couldn’t wait for a letter opener and a cup of tea to begin reading; I immediately ripped into the envelope, leaving the edges all ragged, and read while the water boiled.

     So began an exchange of letters, literature and ideas that lasted five rewarding years. Penny and I became friends and gave one another beloved books for our birthdays. Once, she showed up on my doorstep with a bag of cardamom buns she had made for Easter and wanted to share with me. We encouraged and prayed for one another when troubles traipsed through our lives leaving muddy footprints that needed to be mopped. Alas, both of us eventually fell prey to the monster of “industrial-sized busyness” and our correspondence lapsed and fell silent.

     That was seven years ago. No one I know writes letters anymore–including me. Maybe it used to be a necessary form of communication but, somewhere along the line, it became an art form and then a vanishing one. Times change, I understand, but some things are hard to let go of. I've kept all my letters from my once-upon-a-pen-pal and get them out sometimes to read again. 

     In the witty and charming book 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, the New York writer shares with readers her 20-year correspondence with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for a London bookstore. Twenty years. Now that’s a pen pal. The letters are mostly about books, of course, and to a book-lover like me that is part of its charm, but it is the relationships that develop between Helene and the folks who work at the book shop that make the story so delightful.

     I hope books never go out of vogue, especially ones like this.

Inside Out

   “Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is really rather odd when you realize that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We have been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.”

 ~ Ursula K. Le Guin ~

     I am an introvert. And I am also a writer. It isn’t easy trying to look and act like an extrovert when you aren’t one. The way I make it work is to pretend I am someone else. No kidding. My first job interview after college, in order to calm my nerves and boost my confidence, I pretended I was a princess who had fallen on hard times. I got the job.

     In a recent issue of TIME magazine, Brian Walsh wrote an article about the upside of being an introvert. There are a lot of cool people who are shy. I think Mr. Walsh is pretty cool for turning himself inside out and admitting to the public that he hides in the bathroom when he needs a few minutes to recover from working a social event as a reporter. He says he would rather cover a famine or flood than make small talk with strangers at a cocktail party. I get it.

     Insofar as it challenges me to be friendly and helpful, to get the job or to get the job done, I’m glad to make the effort to be more outgoing even when it makes me feel frizzled afterward. But it has taken me decades to understand: introversion isn’t a flaw, it is part and parcel to the kind of writer I am. I like sitting in a quiet house for hours on end with no other sound but the tick of the clocks and the hum inside my head. I like the solitary work of harvesting words from the fields of imagination to feed my need for expression. I don’t mind turning myself inside out for perfect strangers, as long as they aren’t standing around in a circle looking at me. I like being alone. Some of the time.

     While I am an introvert, I am not antisocial. I could never thrive as a hermit. I like people too much to eschew them altogether, especially children, and adults who have kept a child-like wonder of the world around them, and people who are interested in interesting things. But I like them one or two at a time.

     I could have been a wallflower, standing around the edges of life watching others have all the fun—in many ways it would have been easier—but I have realized the satisfaction and joy of personal experience that observation alone cannot deliver. So I write a novel and try to get it published, help a refugee settle into her new life, get a sales job in a posh store, travel to Brazil to speak to a group of pastor’s wives, and try to make others feel more comfortable at parties than I do. I put on shoes a little too big for me, clomp around in them and hope that nobody notices they don’t quite fit. Someday I may grow into them. Meanwhile, I pretend I am a princess.

Ugly Cake

     My cousin makes ugly cakes. I am not being mean, she told me so herself. She and her youngest daughter have toyed with the idea of opening a tea shop and serving sweeties with their teas, but every time they test a cake recipe it turns out ugly. A cake doesn’t have to look good to taste good–hers are delicious–but if it is true that you eat with your eyes first, there could be a problem.

     She came for a visit last month. She hasn’t been to see me in a long while, so I wanted to make our time together memorable. I baked a buttery cream cake one sunny morning and left it to cool on the counter while we packed up some cucumber and strawberry sandwiches and went for a long walk to the river. When we returned, I sliced the cake into two layers and spread lemon curd between them. Something went wrong. When the cake was assembled it looked wonky. My cousin seemed pleased that I had made an ugly cake just for her. It was so yummy we both ate two pieces.

     I’ve been thinking we should collaborate on a project in which the confectionary challenged submit their unsightly but tasty recipes for publication in the Ugly Cake Cookbook. If we market it well, she could use the capital to open her Ugly Cake Tea Room. Stranger things have happened. I can remember when people used to buy Pet Rocks.

Bunny Business

     My daughter works in a rehabilitation center. As she was going about her duties yesterday morning, she passed a gray-haired woman in a wheelchair propelling herself rapidly through the hallway with an empty Easter basket clutched between her teeth.

     “Out collecting eggs this morning?” she asked the woman as she entered her room a few minutes later.

     “No,” the older woman responded with her usual abrupt manner, “I was delivering them.”

     It turns out the unit secretary keeps a ceramic bunny dish on her desk this time of year. It is usually empty because her candy disappears so quickly she cannot afford to keep it filled. In the early hours of the morning, before the secretary’s shift began, the old woman had filled the dish with jellybeans, Cadbury minis and chocolate bunnies. My daughter passed her in the hallway while she was making her getaway.

    Medical care facilities are often filled with cranks, grumps and melancholics. It is natural and understandable because many of them are suffering. But there are also those special people who, despite their own difficult circumstances, reach out to others.

     And there are some folks who just make you smile.

Bunny dish by a. speer studio 

Eye of the Beholder

     Sometime around the age of forty I began to fade. My strawberry-blonde hair lost its brightness; my peaches-and-cream complexion grew pale. Even my eyes went dim and I had to buy reading glasses. It's the kind of thing that sneaks up on you. I am not afraid of aging, in most ways I even embrace it, but I began to feel dull and unlovely. I must have begun moaning aloud because, one day, I found this card waiting for me in the kitchen:



     My husband is not a traditional romantic, at least not in the candy and flowers sense of the word, so when he gives me a rare, unexpected card it makes an impression. This one is so dear I keep it close to remind myself that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

     There is such desperation in our modern world to cling to the beauty of one's youth. Alas, it has infiltrated my own thinking at times and affected the way I see myself. I do keep myself clean, curled and moderately well decorated, but there is something ineffably sweet in knowing I can show up frowsy-haired in a bathrobe and bunny slippers, and my husband thinks even the skin-deep part of me is still beautiful.

     I like my husband's eyes.

Somebunny

     Winter is long in the upper Midwest. It usually outwears its welcome. By the time spring pokes its shy head above ground we are color-starved. Not this year. An unexpected week of warm breathed over the land and has the bulbs blooming and the treetops bursting with promise. The earth is laughing. A pair of doves built a nest in the evergreen outside my window, and the robins have settled their dispute over who gets the girl. The rabbits are feasting on tender shoots in the garden instead of stripping bark from my shrubbery, and I am feasting on color. Pink. Yellow. Purple. Green. And foil-wrapped eggs.

     Someone has hidden dozens of chocolate eggs all over the house for my husband and me to find. I discovered one beneath my pillow a few nights ago and another in the cupboard among the teacups in the morning. It was the same last year…and the year before. It is still two weeks until Easter so I know the Bunny hasn’t been here, but some bunny has. We don’t go looking for the eggs all at once; it would spoil the fun. Instead, we wait until a chocolate craving grabs us and then snag one from the clock case in the hall or the bookshelf in the study. Oddly enough, the daughter who still lives with us doesn’t eat a single one. She just watches with a gleam in her eyes as her gray-haired parents scour corners for stray eggs like a couple of delighted children.