Is decluttering only for the wealthy? (How to be a better materialist)

Minimalist blogger Joshua Becker recently linked to a Wall Street Journal article about Baby Boomers downsizing. The story seemed to be aimed at upscale readers whose biggest downsizing headache is selling off their art collections.

On the other end of the scale is this blog post at This Simple Balance: 8 Tips for Decluttering on a Low Income (from a mom who's been there). This writer points out the difficulty of asking "Does this bring joy?" when the bigger concerns are "Is this still functional?" and "What if we can't afford another one?"

Our family lived on one income for a long time, and then on even less as we moved to self-employment. We did go through tight-budget, don't-say-no-to-anything times, especially when the kids were young and seemed to need different-sized shoes and clothes every time we turned around.

And even that, compared to serious poverty in this country and overseas, was really nothing. We still had lots of clutter and overload, partly because we got too good at scrounging, and partly because we figured we would eventually find uses for stored stuff. (Often we did.) We were also holding on to many childhood and family items.

So are minimalism and decluttering only options for those who don't have to get anxious about living with less, or about giving away possibly useful things?

I agree with This Simple Balance that some minimalist maxims and strategies work better for those who have more choices. But everybody needs a little of what Amy Dacyczyn calls "margin": clear spaces around things and events, so that we appreciate them properly.  And we may actually benefit when we use our imaginations to repurpose things, or our generosity to share them.

Many of us have stories of our children, or ourselves as children, cherishing one toy, or improvising playthings. When our oldest was a toddler, she used a kitchen chair as her toy stove, with a few yard-saled toy pots. A few years later, we found a large plastic "play kitchen" on Kijiji for her younger sister. Yes, they played with it, but it was an eyesore in the room, and it was always a mess. Then there was even more stress when they outgrew the thing and we suggested passing it on. That would never have happened with a kitchen chair, right?

We also need to claim the right to say "enough," no matter what our income. Someday, sooner or later, the whole economy could change so that we can no longer easily access consumer goods. We might be trading chicken eggs for plumbing work, and making over old clothes because we can't get new ones.  But even then, we have the right to live with, use, and enjoy just enough, and to say no to whatever multiplicity we're stepping on and tripping over. We should feel free to be That Family or That Person, the ones who always sing the same songs, play the same card game after meals, or stop at the same deli on weekends. Maybe your grandchildren will remember your one and only cookie recipe, or your beat-up hat. Call those things quirks, call them traditions, call them your signature item; but don't call them bad things. The author of Affluenza says that if we were a truly materialist (vs. consumerist) culture, we would resist buying new old couches and coats, because we're so fond of the ones we have.

For a few of us, choosing to live with less may start with trimming down the artwork. For others, it's cleaning out the basement once and for all. But the key seems to be, not idolizing, but learning to cherish.

Something to read today: hard, honest talk about minimalism, clothes, and stuff like that

Worth reading:  7 Things Building a Plus-Sized Capsule Wardrobe Taught Me.

From that article:

"When I gained weight in college, finding decent clothing on a budget became even more difficult. Although I still love the orderly cohesiveness of the capsule approach, I think it's important to be aware of the potentially problematic nature of contemporary 'magazine minimalism' that treats making do with less as the latest trend."

Way way back, I wrote a post here on the Treehouse about expensive (but nice) designer toys, Trendoids Spend Lots to Scale Back. I've had similar concerns and conversations about the luxury of being able to super-fine-tune one's diet, or about the trendiness of "tiny houses." These are, to some extent, problems unique to a culture that has enough goods and enough money for people to make those choices. We think of the creative and resilient pioneers and Depression-era survivors, those who made their potato-peel pies and whatnot; but they were as happy as anyone else when times got better. Laura Ingalls Wilder did not spend her later years wishing to eat only wild game and cornbread. Years ago I knew of an "intentional community" that was formed, with the highest of ideals, by a group of overall-wearing, long-haired couples in the 1970's. By the time I visited, ten or fifteen years later, most of them had moved back to the city with their children. Rural realities were not all that romantic.

What about those of us who live on a low budget because of choices we have made (such as staying home with children), who stretch food, make low-cost gifts, re-use, re-cycle; who really do depend on used clothing stores...but who still realize that "fast fashion" has become a problem and that excess, even extremely cheap excess, causes its own problems? (Is there any difference between our family's semi-retired lifestyle and that of, say, someone who was laid off, or a single parent who needs more work hours?)

I bought summer shoes new this year, and a better pair, from a better store, than I am accustomed to getting. For my ugly-bunion feet, they were totally worth it for a season of no blisters. I put an unusual amount of money (for me)  into the sustainably-made dress I bought for our anniversary. And I'm saving up for one more somewhat expensive item for the fall. Does that make me hypocritical, when I get most of my other clothes at the lowest possible thrift store prices? There have been times when it would have been all thrift store and discount store.

But yeah. We see the ridiculousness of Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess in her spare time, but our own understanding of "simplicity" needs to be carefully considered as well. Does "less is more" help us to identify with those who have less, or insult them? Do we take on anything...food style, housing, homeschooling, church styles, because they are the latest thing that floats by, or because we believe those choices put our values into action?

Those are questions that we will just have to keep on asking.

Oh, leave us alone and let us eat

The Deputy Headmistress posted a response to this article, "The Joy of Cooking?", which is an academic-style paper with this as its abstract:

"Sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton offer a critique of the increasingly prevalent message that reforming the food system necessarily entails a return to the kitchen. They argue that time pressures, tradeoffs to save money, and the burden of pleasing others make it difficult for mothers to enact the idealized vision of home-cooked meals advocated by foodies and public health officials."

The DHM made several comments ("Aliens in the Kitchen") based on the body of the article, but I could stop right there with the abstract. I don't cook for either the foodies or the public health officials, any more than I homeschool for the magazine publishers or the school board. My inspiration these days is mostly my own inclination and imagination, combined with what we are able to buy in an increasingly expensive food market, and my motivation is my family.

And yes, besides living on a limited income (for anyone who doesn't know, my husband has been self-employed for two years and we were living on one rather low salary for years before that), I have cooked and continue to cook for picky eating, food intolerances, adolescent meal-skipping, and medically-required diet adjustments.  Not to mention a budding vegetarian and some vegan extended family members. Let me put it this way: as one of the main family cooks and grocery shoppers,  I have my own set of challenges; you probably have yours.  I meet mine as best I can, and I limit myself to occasional gripes when prices go too high or something I sweated over turns up the family noses.

Big deal. That's how you cook for a family.  We have food in the fridge and the freezer and the cupboard.  All the food groups are there.  It's more than enough to keep us going.

And it's only when I start listening to the "foodies" as the authors call them, or to the so-called public health experts, that I get out of whack.  Those public health experts, would those be the ones who want to ban not only peanuts (I'm okay with that) but dairy and other so-called problematic foods from the school system? Leave us alone and let us enjoy our occasional quart of chocolate milk.

As far as preparation goes, North Americans have never had it easier. Low budget or not. See the little casserole dish above? Can you identify the contents?  I bet you can't.  That's butternut squash "butter," like pumpkin butter or apple butter.  I made it last night with a containerful of leftover squash, mixed with some honey and spices. You put it in a pot on the stove or in your slow cooker, and cook it on low for awhile, then mash or puree it to your liking.  What did I really have to do?  I pulled the cooked squash out of the fridge and put it in a pot. (I didn't even have to grow the squash, although I know people who do.)  I squished the honey out of a plastic container.  I stuck a teaspoon into the cinnamon jar and the ginger.  How hard is that?  Not exactly a burden.

And if I didn't want to make squash butter myself, I could have made the choice to go to the store and buy something else to put on my bagel.

But it's only when researchers make what we eat too complicated that we suddenly think we have a problem.  It's not about enacting anybody's idealized vision, it's just about eating.

Related posts:
Keep Your Nose Out of My Lunch Bag
This Doesn't Tug My Heartstrings
I'm Not an Anomaly, I Just Make Dinner
On Not Throwing Out Food, or, Let's Rustle Up Some Grub

Lessons from the poorhouse: The Hidden Art of Homemaking

We recently visited a museum in our area, one we'd never been to before although it's been there for years.  Small museums are typically housed in old mansions, or in school buildings; but this one's on the site of a former "House of Industry and Refuge."  The county poorhouse, in other words, and it functioned under that name until the 1940's.  It's a very solid-looking building, three stories high, with large grounds that originally held fruit trees and vegetable gardens.

Although there are other exhibits in the museum, like a log cabin simulation and a WWI trench, it's the blown-up photos and the in-your-face information about the building's history that seem to steep the whole place in unhappy memories.  As it says in the exhibit, once you were in this place, it was unlikely you'd ever be out.  The poorhouse wasn't an overnight shelter; it was a life sentence. (Occasionally young people, often children who had grown up there, were placed out as apprentices, but that didn't always work out, so they returned.)  The one thing that the "inmates" had in common, whether they were old or young, disabled or healthy, was that they had nowhere else to go.  Nobody wanted them. 

In 1992, PBS broadcast a series of programs called Millennium. One episode's title was taken from an African saying, "The Poor Man Shames Us All." In certain cultures (some more "primitive" than our own), there would have been no concept of allowing members of a community to be brought to such a point of desperation; people just took care of each other. In other words, the worst thing wasn't that there was a poorhouse; it was the fact that there had to be a poorhouse.  In some ways, the county administrators could boast that they were doing more than some other places to make sure that the poorest people were cared for...even having a poorhouse was considered something to be thankful for. Residents had a roof, clothing, food; oranges and hankies at Christmas. It was better than starving to death. But as Dickens said, "many would rather die."

Years later, the people who lived there have been reduced to a series of large, disturbing photo images on the walls of their "home"; is that so much different from their real-life existence?  Why are the faces in those photos so tortured and hopeless?  Was it just from years of poverty, added to mental illness or diseases such as TB, or was it not having anybody to really care for them (beyond each other or the few staff members who helped with their basic physical needs), and having no place to call their own?

The faces staring out from the walls must have been some of the most disconnected, splintered, lost souls of that generation.  Many of them had kind of flunked their life-management exam, and feeling like that is pretty depressing.  Others were there because loved ones had left or died; also depressing. That's a quick judgment, of course.  I don't know.  Maybe some of them were actually happy to have a permanent home, somewhere they felt safe.  Maybe some of them were Christians.  But the overall picture looked pretty grim to me, especially when you figure in the number of people who really needed more than just a home, needed psychiatric treatment, addictions counselling.  Maybe it wasn't so bad on a nice day if you were picking apples or something...but there's a lot of lostness about those photos.

What does that have to do with The Hidden Art of Homemaking?

Simple: all people need homes.  Homes should be part of blocks, neighbourhoods, communities, circles of people getting wider as you go on.  We need to create and preserve communities where people are not allowed to just disappear because there's nobody left to care.  But we start with homes.  Not necessarily two-parent-two-point-five-biological-children families; just places where people are reminded, through words and atmosphere, that their lives are important, and that they belong to the world.  It might be your own home; or it might be the "homey" atmosphere you help create in a classroom, a daycare, or a crisis centre.  Sometimes home can be a day place, even if you find a bed somewhere else.

So don't ever think that there's anything small or insignificant about making home places.

How not to get caught: a family Advent time

We divide up these readings for an evening time around our Advent wreath.

Light the first Advent candle and sing one of our Advent songs.

Read "How to Catch a Monkey."

"If what we have
we believe we have gotten,
and if what we have
we believe we must hold onto,
and if what we have
is not available to others,
then we will live in anxiety.

"Such persons will never know simplicity
regardless of the outward contortions they may put themselves through
in order to live “the simple life.” –Celebration of Discipline
Another old Sunday School illustration: have you ever had somebody ask you to fill a jar with unshelled walnuts and rice? If you put the rice into the jar first and then try to put the walnuts on top, they don’t fit. But if you put the walnuts in first, the rice fills in the space around them, and then everything fits.

"The goal of simplicity is to seek the kingdom of God and the righteousness of his kingdom first, and then everything necessary will come in its proper order….

"It can’t be about just wanting to get away from the noise and the “rat race.”

"It can’t be about giving things up just so that we can spread things out more fairly among rich countries and poor countries, rich people and poor people.

"It can’t be just about saving the earth.

"But: when the kingdom of God is genuinely placed first, ecological concerns, the poor, the fair distribution of wealth, and many other things will be given their proper attention.

"And just because you don’t have much doesn’t mean that you’re truly living in
simplicity. Paul taught us that the love of money is the root of all evil, and often those who have it the least love it the most. It is possible for a person to be living simply on the outside and to be filled with anxiety on the inside." (adapted from Celebration of Discipline)

When our Apprentice was little, we read two picture books that showed both of those different attitudes. One was Journey Cake Ho! by Ruth Sawyer. The old man in the story liked to say, “A bother, a pest! All work and no rest! Come winter, come spring, Life’s a nettlesome thing.” When times get hard, he and his wife send their hired boy off on his own because “what will feed two won’t feed three.”

The other book was Good Times on Grandfather Mountain. "When his cow, Blanche Wisconsin, jumps the fence and runs away, Old Washburn whittles the useless milk pail into a milk bucket drum. When the raccoons sneak in at night and eat every ear of sweet corn, he makes corn cob whistles. And when a fierce mountain storm causes the worst misfortune of all by blowing his cabin down, he finds the wood for a new fiddle. And the new fiddle starts one of the "best times" on Grandfather Mountain." (from the author's website)
"Freedom from anxiety is characterized by three inner attitudes.
If what we have
we receive as a gift,
and if what he have
is to be cared for by God,
and if what we have
is available to others,
then we will possess freedom from anxiety.
This is the inward reality of simplicity."--Celebration of Discipline

Blow out the candle and read the Advent Prayer posted on Beck's Bounty.