Skip to main content

Renewed Order


At the end of every summer, I do a thing that might best be described as "reverse nesting." I think of nesting as getting cozy--this is a big clearing out before the cozyfying. It's still hot but I'm ready for the shimmer to fade from the asphalt so we can go back outside, and I take out my annoyance at the wait on our closets.

Recent personal revelations (and physical changes--I don't know if it's pandemic squish or Being A Woman In Her 30s squish, but honestly I've been underweight for enough of my life that I don't care what number is on my jeans at this point) led to a clearing out of most of my wardrobe, and the kids are all mid growth spurt so we've been making near weekly trips to drop off donations. I cleaned up my side of the closet which prompted my partner (who is honestly a much tidier person generally than I am) to do the same to his side, and also took a hard look at what I really need and what's just filler.

A metric I always keep in the back of my head is a variation on "what would I grab on my way out if I was being evacuated from my home?" except it's "could I fit everything I claim to need into a travel trailer?" Every year I get closer to that answer being yes. I don't know exactly why that's the unit of measure I use--maybe because it's measurable and also smaller than where I live now. I don't want to expand to fill the available space; I want to leave room for adventure.

A trap I can get caught in is scampering back and forth between All The Pretty Things and strident minimalism. Recently I've been trying to find a better balance by acknowledging what I do need (subject to personal definition) and then making sure that those things are pretty. This realization came recently while folding laundry. I do not enjoy doing laundry, and will typically happily live out of the dryer until forced to remove my clothes to make way for the dryer to be, y'know, used to dry something. But after I took out all of the clothes that didn't fit (either my body or my personhood) I noticed that I was putting them away the day I washed them. I guess the block wasn't laundry, per se, but more that on a certain level the specific garments felt like a betrayal and I avoided them.

That revelation caused me to reexamine the places things tend to pile up in my life (both literally and figuratively), in a slightly different way than my usual yearly clear out (I would really love for the yearly clear out to eventually become finding new homes for the few things that are no longer serving our family). I asked myself what it is that I really want (in a grand sense), then did some inventorying, donated quite a few things that I thought I liked but actually turned out that I liked what they represented, and canceled a few subscriptions. I redid my daily schedule and found a large block of time that I'd have sworn I didn't have, and did the same thing with our family budget. I'm not entirely certain what will come of it, at this point, but at least whatever comes to fill in the empty spaces will find a more honest version of me waiting there.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading and Writing

  #attunedpracticetuesdays: where we share the rituals and routines that are aligned with our sense of peace and wellbeing A couple of months ago, while working on a commission project , I started a new practice. I was listening to audio books while working since the project required my eyes but not my full attention, and since it was fairly labor intensive, I took the weekends off (not something I would normally do). Lacking something to do with my hands, the first Saturday I decided to put my speedy reading to good use and read a novel in one sitting (my preferred method, anyway). Then I read another novel the next Saturday. And now it has becomes a weekly thing. The only rule is that it has to be fiction - I read enough non fiction that a novel a week isn't going to hurt anything (and it wouldn't anyway, reading is reading). Helping out with Paper Heart Books and attending a bring-your-own-book-club meeting last week helped restock my dwindling supply. I like to get hard cop
Post a Comment
Read more

Festivals and Fairs

October is the Month of Fun Outings. The weather is generally pleasant, many things are less crowded than they are in summer because school has started back, and there are also an array of local events. We try to make the most of it, since I got used to not getting sick while we stayed in for a couple years so now we ride out the germiest months at home. But before that, we frolic. We'll miss our favorite fall festival due to scheduling conflict, but there will be a small one at my eldest's dance studio, and we're all going to the state fair this year. There are street fairs and at some point soon we'll go and each choose a pumpkin to stack on the front step five deep, and my littlest will name each family member while pointing at their pumpkin every time we go in or out the door.  I've started leaving windows open at night, and sometimes it's been cool enough to have them open during the day, too. My desk candle has expanded to three candles on a cheese board b
Post a Comment
Read more

3.3 - Forage

I recently looked up the rest of the Mary Oliver poem that ends in "tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" because that was the only part I had ever heard, and it turns out the rest of The Summer Day  is about going for a walk and lying about in the grass. That's what she planned to do with her one wild and precious life. I feel like it gets misapplied a lot. As the weather grows cooler, I've been thinking about foraging, as a concept. I am a terrible gardener. Even as a child I loathed getting up early and tramping through the dewy grass to the dusty garden to water and pull weeds. As an adult, I stumbled onto the one plant that likes the climate of my front windows but claim no personal credit for their flourishing. If we ever move I may have to leave them here, to ensure their survival. There's also a pot of mint by my front step that survives on rain water or when one of the kids points out that it's a bit crunchy. Plants
1 comment
Read more