House Lessons

by Erica Bauermeister

  A hoarder would be horrified by this approach—family members who have attempted to do such a clean-out as a surprise have often seen the project backfire spectacularly. But there are plenty of us who fall into the middle ground of simply having accumulated too much. According to the Los Angeles Times, the typical home in the United States contains over three hundred thousand objects, while the US Department of Energy has determined that of those homeowners who have two-car garages, 32 percent of them park one car outside, and 25 percent park both, because the space inside is already filled with stuff. For these people, the results of a Kondo-like purge can indeed be life-changing.

  Kondo’s approach is a straightforward one: Go through each thing you own and ask yourself if it brings you joy. If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, thank it for its service and send it on its way.

  She makes it sound so simple.

  * * *

  —

  MY SORTING FORAYS OF the previous decade had been limited to the main floors, carefully overlooking what lay at the bottom of the stairs. Basements are where life settles, like silt drifting down from the stream above. But now we were actually selling the house, and I had no choice but to go below.

  Our basement was, in general, Ben’s haven—a giant storage locker of camping equipment, woodworking tools, bikes, kayaks, and a Ping-Pong table that was always covered in boxes. In the midst of it all were three black filing cabinets. Paperwork seemed an easy place to start. I opened the top drawer of the closest cabinet and encountered my income tax return from 1982.

  Well, then.

  I went out and bought a shredder. I brought it home, a metal canister the size of the blue air compressor for the power chisel Ry and I had used years before, when we took down the chimney. I held the pages of the tax return over the slit in the top of the shredder, and then listened to its sharp teeth grind their way through my past. One file after another, until I hit the recommended seven-year limit. All those years when I was a barely paid teaching assistant, slogging my way through graduate school. The more than a decade when I was a stay-at-home mom and the manuscripts weren’t selling. There were so many documents that the shredder would start emitting ominous electrical smells, and I would have to give my little factory of destruction a break, thank it for its service.

  In the middle of the files, I found the letter I had received from the Social Security Administration on my forty-fifth birthday, delineating my past earnings and predicting my total future income at $0. Into the shredder it went, munched into thin white strips, which I stuffed into black plastic bags along with the rest until the basement resembled a hayfield during threshing season. A harvest of the unnecessary.

  In the bottom drawer, I found my dissertation, typed in Courier, the paper yellowed. One hundred twenty pages of esoteric literary analysis, an approach that had fit me no better than the pointy black stilettos I’d bought for a party I didn’t even want to attend. I’d gone to graduate school because it had seemed a legitimate way to stay near writing, when all I’d really wanted to do was create new words on blank pages. I’d spent seven years turning myself into someone I wasn’t. I’d known it the moment I graduated—probably long before—and yet I had still kept the dissertation through all those decades since, moving it from my desk to a closet, and then steadily down the levels until it landed in the basement filing cabinet. Now I had to decide, once and for all, what to do with the thing.

  * * *

  —

  WHILE I WAS SORTING through our possessions, I’d been reading Xorin Balbes’s SoulSpace, hoping for inspiration. Published in the United States several years before Kondo’s book, SoulSpace covers much of the same territory, although the two authors come at it from slightly different perspectives—Balbes leaning toward a California interior-designer spirituality, while Kondo demonstrates an impressive tendency toward OCD behavior. The basic premise of both authors’ books, however, is a simple one—keep only those things that bring you true joy, so that when you walk through your house, you are brought alive by the objects you see and touch. It means asking, Do I love this thing with my soul? A truly affirmative answer comes from a deep and certain feeling of recognition that has nothing to do with the sparkling fizz of acquisition or the finding of a good deal. One is nourishment; the other, sugar.

  It also means acknowledging the way some objects can hold you back. Balbes’s book includes fascinating descriptions of clients’ homes, and his approach can feel like a psychological analysis done through a homeowner’s possessions. In the case of Lili, a successful businesswoman who couldn’t seem to find love, Balbes found the answer in her house. As he walked through its rooms, he noticed that the bed was large enough for two, but one side was pushed against the wall. In the living room, there was an uncomfortable couch and a single good reading chair. You get the idea—but what is surprising, or perhaps not, is that Lili never saw it herself. When she moved the bed, pitched the old couch, and bought a second comfortable chair, she opened up her life to a new partner.

  Was it the more welcoming furniture, or her acknowledgment of her behavior that brought about the change? I think it was both, in that way that our emotions and possessions naturally interact, reinforcing and reminding us of our best and worst tendencies. Balbes and Kondo would suggest we aim for the former and discard the latter.

  * * *

  —

  STANDING THERE IN THE basement, I flipped through the pages of my dissertation, smelling the mustiness inside. I could keep it as a symbol of accomplishment, leaving the pages in the drawer, muttering away like Rochester’s wife. Or I could look about me, at the life I had made since, the one I would choose over and over again.

  The dissertation soared across the room into the recycling bin.

  And with that, the floodgates were opened. Those black stilettos—gone. The garden gnome that creeped me out but was a gift from a relative who might visit someday found a new home at Goodwill. Then there was the leather-bound volume of Shakespeare plays, given to me by a boyfriend I had long wanted to forget—but what respectable English major gets rid of Shakespeare? Me, apparently.

  It felt astonishingly good.

  * * *

  —

  WEEKS LATER, AFTER AN embarrassingly large number of trips to the dump and a gigantic final garage sale, the possessions we had chosen to take with us were finally packed in boxes and ready to go. Ben and I rented a U-Haul truck and put out the word to family and friends: Come help us move. We have pizza and beer.

  In all our relocations—from Los Angeles to Seattle, from one apartment or house to the next—we had never hired movers. You could say that we were penny-pinchers, and you’d probably be right. But there was something more to it. Moving your own things—lifting and carrying their weight—is an opportunity to know in your muscles how much you have. And having others help you, and helping them in turn, is a way to build community, something we Americans used to do a lot more of.

  I read once about an island off the southern coast of Chile called Chiloé. It is small—mostly inhabited by fishermen and farmers. When a family needs to move house, due to rising tides or a desire for more farmable land, the community takes the action literally. They come together and transport the building itself, in a tradition called a minga. Like an American barn raising, it is an activity done without payment, with the knowledge that you, too, will be helped sometime in the future.

  I thought about the friends and family who had been with us along the way in this journey toward the house in Port Townsend—who had helped clean out the trash and sledgehammered walls and planted grass seed and painted shingles. Now, hands that we knew and loved were lifting boxes, sending them, and us, on our way.

  * * *

  —

  IT HELPED IN MORE ways than one to have friends with us as we got ready to leave. It is a hard thing to move, whether or not you love where you are going. My father had a rule when making major decisions in his life: You need a reason to go, and a reason t
o leave. Fleeing without a destination, or leaping toward something without an understanding of why you are going, will always leave you slightly off balance. But if you work your way through both reasons, you will have to look both forward and back, a classic push-me/pull-you thought process that helps you face the future, ready and secure.

  I knew where I was going. I knew why I was leaving. But what my father’s saying didn’t tell me was what to do with all the emotional reasons to stay anyway. Because the thing about houses is that regardless of their layout, regardless of whether you have fought them or flowed into them—they hold your family. The house in Seattle had held ours for twenty-two years. Our son was a baby, our daughter a toddler, when I had seen the FOR SALE BY OWNER ad in the paper and known that this old, rangy house, only four blocks away from our too-small one, could give us the space we needed. When we moved in, the rooms echoed around us, and we filled them with our lives.

  Houses are made of wood and glass, but they are also made of the events that happen within them. The dining room was dark, but it was also the setting for candlelit family dinners and evenings when Ry’s friends would spread out their board games and play late into the night, their laughter bouncing up the stairs. The kitchen had been our Grand Central Station, full of high chairs and dog bowls, and during its own renovation—while the walls were still studs and the floors plywood—it was where we hosted my favorite birthday party for Ben, using sawhorses to make a table, covering it with a white linen tablecloth, and surrounding it with friends. And then there was the piano room, with its fake Art Deco wallpaper, which we swore we’d replace right away and never did, the room that never did hold a piano but where I’d watched every episode of Sex and the City with my daughter during the summer before she went to college—because she’d wanted to, and because I’d wanted to sit there next to her on the couch for as long as we could.

  Years before, I’d collected photos of our lives and put them in an envelope in the wall by the front door of the house in Port Townsend. What I didn’t know was how to take the memories that lived in the walls of this one.

  * * *

  —

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, THE U-HAUL truck and Ben and our kids and friends were gone. I was on task to do the last cleanup, but before that, I went next door to see my neighbor. Rachel and I had raised our children together, providing a sanity check for each other on long and rainy afternoons filled with pent-up toddlers and then teenagers. For years, when our husbands’ careers were new and time intensive, she and I traded off cooking dinner for each other, plates delivered through a gate we had built in the fence between our two backyards. Once a week—a grown-up meal with salad, in a life otherwise ruled by macaroni and cheese. It’s funny how much those things matter.

  Our kids were gone now, our houses quiet. In her kitchen, Rachel handed me a gin and tonic. We went into her backyard and sat under the oak tree that had grown over the decades into the behemoth of the neighborhood. She couldn’t bear to cut it down, so she had given up her sunny vegetable beds and planted a shade garden under its boughs, and we sat among the ferns and talked. And then, because children are never fully fledged, she went to pick up her son at the airport, and I went back to the Seattle house one more time.

  * * *

  —

  IT’S AMAZING HOW FULL an empty house can feel. It was as if I could see our family more clearly now, as if without furniture there was space for the memories to breathe. I cleaned each room, wiping down the surfaces, washing the floors. When I was finished, I went through the rooms again, taking a photograph of each one. The late August light was coming in sideways, the way I love it, illuminating parts of the house that only saw the sun for those few hours of the year, as if every bit of the house were saying goodbye. I checked each closet and drawer for items left behind and then headed for the front door, past the sideboard with its pile of twenty duplicate keys we had collected from our children, neighbors, friends, and extended family who had been given free access to our lives. I could have left mine behind, too; the door locked on its own. But I told myself I might have to come back—perhaps I would remember that I’d left on the heat, which hadn’t been turned on all summer, or that I’d forgotten the toaster I knew I’d packed a week before. So I kept the key and closed the door, hearing its funny little double click as it settled in place.

  Then I walked down the stairs, got in the car, and headed north to the ferry.

  THE WRITING SHED

  If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house…I should say: the house shelters daydreaming.

  —Gaston Bachelard

  WHEN WE FIRST DISCOVERED the house in Port Townsend, my mind was still half in the plane returning from Italy, unsure, needing roots for my family but also, as much as anything, for myself. When I came back to the house the second time, I was an empty nester, unsure of myself once again. Each time, the house presented a possibility for renovation, always different, but always when I needed it most. Now as I walked up its front steps, I could feel the possibilities once more.

  Thank you, I said. But whether I was thanking the house or all the intricacies of life and luck that had led us to it, allowed us to keep it again and again, I couldn’t say. Perhaps they were one and the same in the end.

  I opened the door, and there was that scent waiting for me.

  * * *

  —

  IN THIS ITERATION OF our lives, the house would be a dwelling for two, a number we wanted to be able to expand to many without effort before contracting back—a state something like breathing. After all the sorting we’d just done, I was determined to keep things simple and purposeful, and we took our time finding the right places for our things.

  We’d brought with us the small closet door on which we’d measured our children as they grew, and now we hung it on the wall just inside our back door, so the kids would greet us every time we walked in. Photos of our children and siblings and parents went on the sideboard in the dining room, so we would always eat with family. We positioned our bed so that we would wake looking out at the water, and in the nook halfway up the stairs, I put research books for future novels, a reminder each time I passed by that new worlds waited. Object by object, we settled in.

  * * *

  —

  LIFE ROLLED THROUGH THE years in waves—one, three, five. Our daughter got married. Our son grew strong and tall. Ben and I lost our mothers, our dog, old friends. After every loss, every celebration, we would come back to the house and it would open its arms and fold us back in. It became the place where we lived.

  * * *

  —

  I DON’T KNOW EXACTLY when it happened, when the blank-slate space I had once used solely for writing turned into a home, full of love, but also with a washer and dryer and refrigerator that needed tending, and an internet that clamored for my time like a small child. The memories of my year in the empty nest kept the bubble of creativity around me for a while, but eventually, the details of reality snuck in, as they will. I could hear them whispering between the keystrokes as I typed: Pay attention to us. We need you more. It became hard to discern the characters’ voices that had been so clear before. My writing slowed. Circled. I worried about Alzheimer’s and took herbs for memory and mental acuity, but they didn’t seem to make a difference.

  More and more often, I found myself looking out the window, down to the lower orchard. The ivy had been held at bay more or less, and the fruit trees stretched toward one another across a fairy circle of green grass. At the end nearest the street, however, there was now a gap where two huge trees had once stood—a sequoia and a spruce, originally planted so close together that they’d become half trees, well on their way to killing each other by the time we’d had to take them down, a few years before. But cutting a tree is a painful business, and the space where they once stood felt raw and unloved, while the seclusion of the lower yard had been obliterated. It needed something—a way to remember those evergreens and bring the magic back ag
ain.

  “What if we built a writing shed?” I asked Ben.

  * * *

  —

  I AM NOT THE FIRST WRITER to feel the desire for a separate space, away from the demands of the everyday. It was Virginia Woolf who gave it the moniker we use most often—a room of one’s own—although behind her use of one resided a much more feminist message. I had some money that was all my own—an inheritance from my mother. I thought she would have liked the idea of a place set aside for creativity.

  I wanted a small space; I think it goes back to that almost primal urge to create a fort, a hideaway, under a table or in a tree. I was not alone in that feeling, either: George Bernard Shaw’s writing shed was a mere eight-by-eight feet, set on an ingenious steel turntable that could rotate with the sun. Dylan Thomas had his “word-splashed hut” perched on stilts above an estuary, with ten windows that looked out to views that swept his thoughts clean. Roald Dahl fashioned his writing retreat on Thomas’s design, using the same six-by-seven footprint and angled roof—although Dahl opted for far less natural light. He wrote in a wingback chair that once belonged to his mother, cocooned by an astonishing number of pictures and books. Dahl said, “When I am in this place it is my little nest. My womb.” One has to wonder what Virginia Woolf might have made of that last comment.

  Michael Pollan documented the building of his own writing space in his book A Place of My Own. For Pollan, that bit of separation meant everything. “It might be a view of the same old life, but from out here it will look different,” he wrote, “the outlines of the self a little more distinct.” Pollan took his task seriously, spending time figuring out just the best site and orientation, drawing on advice from Vitruvius to feng shui. His attention to detail was meticulous and loving. You can hear the art of it in the rhythms of his sentences, as if process and product indeed became one.