Stuffstream

In Days of Yore. . . . You remember the era, Yore. (In one episode of Friends, Rachel is surreptitiously buying furniture from Pottery Barn, which Phoebe despises for its spiritless mass produced stuff, pretending that the pieces are antiques from a Flea Market. Excited, Phoebe asks Rachel what era the "antiques" are from. Rachel sheepishly answers, "Yore . . . . Days of Yore.") In Days of Yore, when farms were fifty acres and farmers had fifty cows, chickens, pigs, a vegetable garden, each farm had at least two-three outbuildings, one shed devoted to junk and stuff. Stuff that could be used at some later date. In Days of Yore, there were no Menards or Fleet Farm. The dry goods store could order some parts, but they were mightily expensive. So if a piece pf equipment broke, it wasn't just tossed. It was saved in the "junk shed." All sorts of metal parts, tools, leather straps, metal barrels and wooden barrels and containers, every conceivable...

Everybody needs a junk drawer . . . or two or three or four. Four! Why not? Who decides? I have a junk drawer in almost every room of my house. You can see if you have a small house, with only so many rooms, you may need to clean them out and use them for storage. Storage? Who says a junk drawer isn't storage. You never know when you might need a . . . . Junk drawers go against all the principles of pristine organizing and scorched earth decluttering. Which is probably why I like them. They are an important tool in the stuffstream. If you have a junk drawer in a room, then when there's that thing you don't know what to do with, or don't even know what it is--it's like long, but flat at one end, tapering to a point, but it's not really a nail or a screw, which you have a place for in the laundry room, a little jar with screws in it, though it's too big to fit in that little jar anyway. But it's not a screw. So. Open the drawer and toss it ...

You've heard the expression, "She's a clothes horse!" (It's always a 'she' isn't it?) What a "clothes horse!" Ever wonder where the expression came from? From 1788. A clothes horse is an upright wooden frame used for hanging clothes to dry. You probably have one, that flimsy wooden thing that you set up to dry some things, not many things, maybe your delicates, because it's wobbly, and you have to make sure it's balanced, and Oh, do you feel righteous, because you're drying your things on a rack and not putting a load in the dryer. But the dryer is running nonstop because you can only dry one pair of jeans on the clothes horse, and it takes at least 24 hours to dry them, and that's on a dry day. You'd put it in the sun, but it would probably blow over. Clothes horse also means a person (It's always a she.) whose sole (soul?) purpose is to wear a lot of fancy clothes. No. The purpose of this blog is not t...

You've heard what the professional organizers and declutterers say, "Surround yourself only with what you love." Well, I don't always like my husband, but I keep him. Love is subjective. One man's meat is another man's trash, or fish, or something like that. There's no accounting for tastes. A cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind? What did Einstein say? If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what is an empty desk the sign of? What do I love? What are the things I love, that no one else might love? The dry, dusty Catnip on trays on the porch. The long--obscenely long--gourds also on the porch. The tangled--what looks like weeds--in the yard, but it's deadly nightshade entwined with Grandpa Ott Morning Glories and purple asters, hundreds of bees buzzing around them in a frenzy. The dying cosmos in the vase on my desk... Why do I love these things? Each has a story. I cut the Catnip in the spring and put it on trays. ...

You know what your grandmother always said. 'There's a place for everything and everything in it's place.' She always also said, "Don't put it down, put it away." Stuffstream is about, not the stuff, but the places where stuff can go, or might go. There are no rules about where it SHOULD go. No SHOULDS. It is not necessarily a de-cluttering blog, or get organized blog. It will not guilt you into thinking that something is wrong with you if you have piles of stuff around, or suggest that if you get rid of everything and start over with an empty room, you will conquer the collecting and hoarding. Or you should roll your T-shirts up in your drawer, or shove everything into a closet so you can have a clean desk with only a sheet of paper and an orchid on it. It's not about feng shui or the best Ikea organizing system. This is real. We are who we are. We have the stuff we have. Though we might want to find that receipt or that certain hair tie, an...