"Clutter me Happy"

You're on the right page, the "Less is Plenty" page....but this is a post in defense of CLUTTER.

Why? Because the room I love most in my house--the kitchen--NEEDS to have clutter. I have found, if I can't have kitchen clutter, I can't have an ordered, "Less is Plenty" life.

Anyone serious about not wasting money on convenience foods or eating out, but who still craves lovely mealtimes, (versus porridge)knows this. You cannot have hidden blenders, toasters or accessories that require a ladder or serious stooping to access. You cannot have vital utensils stored in the nether-reaches, or you will never reach for them to make truly good meals every day.

I'm not a lightweight in the kitchen, but I am not any kind of obese, either. I'm lithe enough to yet climb and bend and access, and to see it all as good exercise while I work. But I also have a serious image of a dream-heroine in my mind, a matronly woman who nurtures and loves, who drops all her reservations about society-at-large and who just wants to be friends with everyone through food.

I can't be too skinny for this, and I can't be too orderly. I have tried both. It defies my reality now to believe I ever (as a young, skinny cook) asked my husband to construct a cabinet to hide my kitchen STOVE when not in use, but I did. And he did--he built it for me.

For some months, I lifted wooden doors up top my electric stove to expose the burners, and opened wooden front doors to get a sheet of cookies into the oven. All the time food cooked, horrendously gangly doors stood floppy and agape, a real precious sight in direct argument with my intent to hide a modern appliance I wasn't crazy about the looks of. I got the silly idea from a silly woman in a country-living themed magazine, and if the agent who sold us our homeowner's policy had seen it, he would have crossed us off his list of valued clients.

He didn't see it, and in a few months time, I didn't want to see it either. I shamefacedly admitted to my spouse it was a bad idea, and away it went. But do you think I appreciated the stove in all its exposed glory THEN? No. It was banished to the basement when I found an ancient "Monarch" combination wood-burning AND electric stove, and we (according to insurance regulations) installed it in the other's place. The "Monarch" had the "matronly" look I wanted all along, with a no-need-to-cover-it-up factor involved.

So, it's not that I'm not an "a place for everything and everything in its place" person. I go to great lengths for order, and if there's a problem, I fix it. Or my husband fixes it. Okay, so mostly my husband fixes it.

But.....even if you enjoy cooking or don't mind all meals quick and easy, when you've been swept away (as most of us sometimes are) by alluring meals from the freezer aisle, the deli, or take-out places or restaurants, do you ever tally up what it costs per month to not cook at home, even just some of the time?

I have, during stretches of our family-raising years, and it added up to a modest mortgage payment--at least one common to our neck-o-the-woods.

I've always liked to cook, but I've always also liked to NOT cook, too. I have waffled and wasted between the two extremes for many years, and I even owned a restaurant of my own for some of those years. Even as I gave surplus food away to my friends and neighbors, I sometimes just wanted to eat someone else's cooking, and we often did.

We did it often enough and long enough to know this: with few exceptions, food away from home is mostly not that good, overpriced, and rarely lingers for favorable in the mind. And it nearly NEVER lingers in the memory like Mom's food does.

I did have the best example for this, growing up. My mom managed healthy meals and general sustenance for a family of ten on a limited income. We never went hungry and we always went "delicious." I love to imitate her meals, to this day. My dad may have earned less overall than many other fathers we knew, but his hard work and Mom's creativity and enthusiasm for a good meal always provided our family a great sense of plenty.

As it has through the ages, "plenty" comes from a "waste not" mindset. If our sky has a ceiling, we figure what we can do with less of so that we can have plenty in more important areas. In recent years we definitely adjusted to eating out far less, and saw an improvement in our dollar "plenty."

Funny, but now, when my spouse and I CAN eat out more, and at least more "conveniently", the thrill of it is gone. We love this sense of plenty, in extra-good food, extra dollars, extra choices in leisure for other areas. Mostly, we like the sense of plenty in being able to do things for our children and grandchildren; it is the greatest worth "plenty" can exemplify.

BUT. I NEED the clutter in my kitchen to be efficient at what I do. The things I use regularly have to be at hand. With the counter-space of a "less is plenty" sized home, this means things show, they are not hidden, they are ready to be used. They do not get in my way, they MAKE the way for me to get things done.

"LESS" in the kitchen I cannot do, and for one other reason. In keeping with my matronly role model, I love to immerse myself in the "feel" of her aura, and era. I want to cook with the things she cooked with!! They are not all practical, but they are beautiful. They are ART. Vintage cutting boards are my backsplash, and vintage tools and kitchen accessories are my inspiration. Most I have used, many I use often. All are ready and set to go in apocalyptic times!!

Does my defense of clutter make sense, to the spirit of "less is plenty"? What in your life, do you sometimes think you have too much of, but then say NO, I'm good, thank you very much!? Please comment, either here or on my less is plenty Facebook page, and thanks for reading!!

These Plates Were Made for Using

(More, new perspective on my favorite "Sterbuck Farm" Story)

In MY dictionary, if you looked up the meaning of "bittersweet" there would have to be a picture of my favorite pretty plates alongside.

Let me get the "bitter" out of the way first.

Although I'm happily using these vintage plates for everyday now, it is because I have come to a somewhat sad conclusion: I'm not going to outlast these dishes. They will be the last set I buy, the last set I will use. For a person who has "changed out" dish patterns all her married life, this is a little bittersweet.

But I have a bigger number of this pattern than I ever dreamed possible, and that is very sweet. It is a number bigger than can break in a routine course of use, and I just don't expect anything but the routine here. I'm not going to give them away, because I love them. And I'm not looking for, only hoping against, any act of God or "downfall" in the kitchen that would ruin any significant number of them.

In fact, I've always thought it was a special act of God who brought them to me in the first place. And NO, I'm not being dramatic.

The pattern IS one of the first that I truly enjoyed, actually, in my married life. The problem was it was just one single dish I found, at a flea market, for one thin dime. Oh, that I could have found more, I would have paid their price and brought them home decades ago, as a young mom and wife, trying in earnest to make her house a home.

For about a decade, I never saw another one like it. It must be its gorgeousness, I thought, that made this so. Pretty in pink and blue, I was covetous of more, seeking the pattern out evermore.

Alas, not to be, or so it seemed. I had found it in Colorado, where we lived for fourteen years, the last few in a financial and spiritual downturn for our little family. In crisis, we left, to work and save in California, where our families were. The plan was to eventually move into an also dispirited farmhouse in Wisconsin, one that had known thirty years of abandonment and revealed it openly, no matter how lovely its surroundings were, and even in its very yearning heartbeat.

It still wanted a family. We earnestly wanted a home. When we finally arrived in 1988, we joined together tentatively. "Sterbuck Farm" justifiably
wondered about what we were made of. It had been rejected countless times. Its story, we learned, was one of many "leavings" and in truth, from the moment we pulled in with the moving van, we considered doing so ourselves. The dream of it had been so romantic an adventure, its reality disappointed as mostly daunting and fearsome. It would wait us out, and we could do nothing but try to see it through.

And then the plate turned up, in its very soil, that very first spring. We were planting a garden, and up it came with a shovel, whole and perfect.

Can you blame us for the significance we saw in the pattern that emerged from the earth? It seemed to say, "Don't give up, don't feel dispirited. You are meant to be here. You are meant to give it the good, more cheerful try."

We needed to hear that. We needed to pick up the inspired pace. We needed to quit with the dejection and look up, look around. The farmhouse was habitable, and sound. It sat center of a work-of-art landscape that only God could be the signer of. The folks in our "neighborhood" were friendly and had reached out to us, and our little family had each other. We had to see the positive, and this THING, this physical item that I had searched far and wide for, in places much more likely and appropriate, had emerged from the ground in the middle of our "nowhere."

So it spoke to us all. We definitely perked up that day, knowing the "message" was something worth sustaining.

Our new neck-of-the-woods proved to be a region of the country where "my" dish pattern had obviously, in a previous era, been very popular. One shop keeper said he thought pieces were given away in oatmeal boxes, with others available for purchase either on store shelves or by order. In the late eighties, I started finding pieces everywhere, reasonably priced. Still perfect, still beautiful, to my eye and heart, so I picked up every one I came across. Close to our 25th wedding anniversary, I found a whole box of them complete with two platters and a creamer and sugar, vegetable servers, and much more. For a time, I stopped buying them, thinking what I'd accumulated we rarely used, and that we might never, really.

Craziness.

Why not start using them? I had said I should, and finally I did, for special occasions. Then a funny thing happened. Just like I hoped they would, they put me back in time. They put me back to the days of Sunday dinners and matronly mothers or grandmothers serving them up, of warm, steamy kitchens with aromas flowing out-of-doors, like the Johnny Cash lyrics (Sunday Morning Coming Down)"I walked across the street and caught the Sunday smell of someone frying chicken...and Lord, it took me back to something that I'd lost."

Ah, YES. Something many of us have lost...that Sunday dinner feeling, or of any lovingly prepared meal, capable of uniting families and sustaining not just bodies but souls, fit for memorializing a "feeling" unto the ages.

In her long-beloved series Laura Ingalls Wilder did this memorializing like no one else. When I was growing up in the sixties in Southern California, her "meal descriptions" transported me to another place and time, so that somehow, I wanted to capture those times and make them my own. It helped that my own mother had a "Laura" mindset about good meals around a family table, and between all such examples another kitchen nurturer was born. No. Modern Day. Apologies for loving the kitchen!!

I can't recall the plates my mother used, and I don't know that Laura's would have been quite this decorative. But I think both would have appreciated them as gems. I think both would have admired their pretty appeal, and that they were easily enough obtained so that they could serve for everyday, and yet suffice for special, too. I think both would have embraced, as I have, the gentle knife and fork lines that have lovingly scarred my plates. These creases, like the lines on a face, represent love forward, love accepted eagerly and love remembered. And no, I'm not being dramatic!

A plate is just a "thing", it's true. At the shop I owned for many years, I used many sets for serving, for selling, for decorating, for bringing home and using. My customers were as guilty as I was of loving pretty dishes; even the men noted and appreciated them. So it is something of a mystery to me that I am sure now

, I don't need another dish set in my life. I don't want another dish pattern in my life.

This is the one that makes me feel most like Laura, and honors most the homey legacy my mother also left behind. It's the one my kids know is nearest and dearest to my heart. And it is already the only one that my grandchildren have known in this household.

It is the one that reminds me a past I never lived, and it is the one I will take to my grave. Crushed, and mingled with my ashes. And yes, I AM being dramatic.

Small Miracles

I'm not sure I believe in happenstance, or coincidence. I see things more as God-intended, or God-allowed. I do believe in miracles, that big ones are more precious by virtue of their rarity, but that small ones happen often because the Maker likes to inject joy into our days, and his.