Today, put angst over government dysfunction aside and consider stuff, and how most of us have way too much of it.
Marie Kondo is the Japanese star of a new Netflix television show and the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and three other books on organizing one’s possessions. Kondo and her “KonMari” method of discarding unloved possessions has launched a decluttering craze in some households – guilt, despair or resignation in others. Getting rid of clutter, Kondo believes, clears the path to happiness.
Kondo’s philosophy calls for jettisoning any possession that doesn’t “spark joy” of ownership. On her show, in which she helps a household tidy up, she is polite, ever-smiling and ruthless.
Getting rid of useless junk does feel good. But Kondo’s philosophy conflicts with an ancient Yankee ethos. We fear what she would advise when confronted, as the late poet Donald Hall was, with a forebearer’s box labeled “String too short to be saved.”
It’s true that most of us move through life like a cetacean dragging a string of lobster traps and fishing nets. But some of that stuff jammed in closets, piled in attics and filling garages could, as a good Yankee would say, come in handy someday. Repurposing is the highest form of recycling.
In String Too Short to be Saved, Hall’s collection of remembrances of life on his grandfather’s Wilmot farm in the first half of the last century, he describes his trip to a treasure-filled attic. He finds chamber pots missing handles, an antique bicycle and a jack-in-the-box that still works. Kondo would no doubt pitch it all, but for Hall it sparked the joy of remembrance of times past.
We can’t say that any of the 20 or so hammers or 50 screwdrivers in our barn spark joy, but joy can be found in having the right tool for the job when needed. A generation or so ago, when the right tool, or pretty much anything else couldn’t be found, the frugal Yankee shopper’s first stop wasn’t a store but the homestead of that guy in town who had pretty much everything and most of it was for sale. We hope such people still exist and survive the Kondo craze.
In Hillsborough, if one needed, say, a hoe or a doorknob to match the others in the house, a shopper dropped in on Weasel Burbank. Burbank was a thin, long-bearded scholar of stuff with a barn full of it.
In Weare, a savvy shopper saw a guy called, though not to his face, The Seagull, because he was always at the dump adding to his collection.
For us, the pinnacle of packratdom, the ultimate anti-Kondo, could be found on a back road in Deering.
Seekers turned right at the bullet-hole-riddled sign of a Holstein and paid Clayton O a visit. Clayton was a jack-of-all-trades, Yankee trader and collector. His house was filled, save for space around the kitchen table and wood-burning cookstove, with stuff – not junk, but useful, often collectible stuff. Filled, too, were sheds, dead cars and an old bread truck.
Shopping there was unlike anything encountered before or since. A pigpen constructed from old bedsprings kept a hog in place. Beyond the pen was a six-foot-high wall of TVs whose innards had been removed. Each TV displayed pretty much the same picture, a chicken roosting on eggs, which were also for sale.
It was a masterpiece of recycling that, with every visit, sparked joy.