Series One/Post Three -- Jacki and Will’s Basement
The other day I neatly folded a vintage cashmere sweater and put it away, in a drawer, in the bureau in my bedroom. And I thought: This is all because of A Sorted Affair! I hadn’t had a bureau in a bedroom in almost twenty years: I lived out of suitcases and closets and roll-away thingies you buy for exorbitant prices at the Container Store. If you live in a New York loft, as I do part-time, there may be no need for anything more than a closet. It never occurred to me to live otherwise in rooms with bureaus. Bureaus are where foreign correspondents live, and I was ready to go. I have my little stashes already waiting on wheels.
Now, though, I have a handsome teak (sustainable) bureau in the Swedish modern style. It matches -– in spirit, if not in fact, an older one that belonged to my husband (ok, I confess: I had ONE of his drawers, but he had all the rest.) Upon that bureau are a vintage lamp and a traveling antique writing desk from Syria. They look great there. My husband is happy.
And that is a good thing, because he was the whole reason for calling in the professionals in the first place, or so I told myself. A well ordered home does, I believe, provide a well ordered mind — isn’t that why hotel rooms were invented? But when you have to come to your own home and sigh, and moan, as I did, at the mere sight of our basement…well, it was enough to make me want to turn around and go right back out. There were things in there best left in the recesses of memory: the boots that had mice using them as a house; old but usable film equipment that went to a school; and 20,000 negatives that are now in chronological order. I can breathe again.
The Mondays Caitlin and I spent sorting, stacking, labeling, ordering items from IKEA to hold books, re-purposing stuff from the garage (though I am still hearing about an antique oil can I accidentally threw out) and getting an actual fold-out sofa in the basement were, to quote the bard, “Verie Heavyn”. We got a whole new level on our small Cape Cod (we believe in a collection of small houses, the better to rotate around and no, we don’t have kids. I do, however, have a box for kids’ clothes, which I buy all over.) just by emptying out the basement and creating a room. AND, behind a film poster painted on canvas from Iran, storage for suitcases and books, prints to be framed, and holiday décor.
Sanity is in the Details. The movie poster says “City of Women,” and I’ve ordered the accompanying film (subtitled). When I have, say, the hummingbird feeder in my hand, I go downstairs and put it in a box labeled hummingbird feeder. (I took it out when the hummer returned. I have a lot of sympathy for their constant commotion.) The walls of the basement are full of shelves with a happy assortment of boxes that hold, for the most part, the stuff of our lives.
This is the great thing about getting organized. You have to curate and edit your own life. You have to pretend, just for the moment, that YOU are the Andy Warhol whose dozens of boxes will one day be opened for posterity. Only, you can’t ship them away to Pittsburgh, as Warhol did, you have to go through them NOW. And that’s very interesting, and why Caitlin Shear loves her job. There, at the bottom of a box, is a Valentine or a skeleton key or baby sock, and it tells a whole story, or maybe, a page from a story. I found a whole box of t-shirts from my husband’s concert-going and filmmaking days of the 1980’s, and charitably I can say that he will not be wearing them again for a variety of reasons.
However, we will be snuggling beneath them because Caitlin had the wit to suggest they be made into a quilt! (See richmondseamstress.com, and that’s another story.) So now, when I travel the two flights of stairs from our upstairs bedroom to the downstairs basement I am, in fact, traveling the well-ordered distance of a lifetime.
And I am very, very happy.