I give lots and lots of advice about decorating but need some myself now. I simply don’t know what to do with magazine clutter, specifically all my Martha Stewart Living magazines. Our more than twenty years’ worth are emitting an explosion of magazine clutter.
As a designer, I need them. To me, Martha is the queen of good taste. There is something about her decorating that evokes a graceful scaffolding, an energy to everything aesthetic.
If most decorating magazines are about status, Martha Stewart Living often teaches beauty
Yet, the 250-plus Marthas in my home are doing just the opposite. Yes, I should get rid of them. But I can’t bear to throw them away, sell them, or donate them to nursing homes. There might be a special decorating hint, idea, or recipe lurking between a cover.
You can get everything online, friends say. Not so, I’m afraid. I learned the hard way when I was in our NYC apartment preparing to make my favorite Martha’s onion soup. I had left the recipe at the country house. I found plenty of onion soup recipes on Martha’s website, but not the amazing one from the November 1994 issue.
The Soup
One of my guests called this soup “brown gold.” Roasting beef bones, tomato paste, and vegetables reveals multiple layers of flavors. Once the aroma of browning onions, softening leeks, and garlic wafts throughout the house, I know it is time to add them to the spring water along with the red wine deglazed pan particles. After three hours of simmering with peppercorns, thyme, and bay leaves, a defatted and strained soup welcomes white wine, cognac, and caramelized onions. Cooked down to almost a demi-glace of mouthwatering onion essence, those onions simply disappear. It takes ten hours to make.
Storing Great Secrets at a Price
My niece stayed in my guestroom when she visited years ago. It’s where all my Martha Stewart Living magazines are piled high on the dresser and adjacent tables. I planned to get rid of them, I told her, but she insisted that I save them. So I did. My niece, a collector herself, had a big basement that’s drier than mine.
She visited again last week. When I brought up the Marthas, she said, her face beaming with relief, “All mine are gone now.” Hurricane Sandy had rolled the ocean into her home, soaking the magazines with salt water and effluvium, topped with a few flopping jellyfish.
Getting Organized
Clutter can be organized, and I tried. I had no more room for yet another shelf in my office/guest bedroom. It was already packed with decorating, architecture, and philosophy books. So my idea was to go through each issue, clipping the articles to keep, stapling them, and filing them in envelopes marked “Recipes,” “Ideas,” “Good Design,” and “Bad Design.” (Martha Stewart Living had little to contribute to the “Bad Design” file.) After more than fifty hours of this, I managed to reduce my Martha inventory by only 20 percent. It was exhausting. You can’t do more than a few issues a day. Don’t ask me why.
I don’t have that kind of time. I have an old house to attend to. Unlike Martha, I must paint my 150-year-old windows myself, tend to eight gardens, and stain my decks. There are pickles to be made, beans and peaches to be picked, and I spend a great deal of time editing my book. Old floors need attention and, of course, twice a year I make a double portion of Martha’s onion soup for the freezer.
My husband and I are well acquainted with the magazine-collecting dilemma. It took us eight years to divest ourselves of his old copies of Smithsonian Magazine and National Geographic.
But All These ‘Marthas’!!!
Never have I let a magazine situation get so out of hand. In 2000, Real Simple came out. It’s packed with hints on how to make less demanding cleaning, beauty, cooking, and other of life’s chores. After six issues, I realized the irony: the pile was getting me away from “simple.” The more simplicity tips I collected, the less simple my environment got. So I began discarding Real Simple immediately after reading it. I just can’t do that with Marthas.
In my book, I write about the eye movements of perception and how they outline a subliminal pattern. My intuition tells me that patterns that duplicate forms in nature cause a subtle positive energy in the environment. That intuition also tells me that the discordant patterns of clutter produce energy-depleting eye movements.
I know of many ways to contain clutter that fool the eye into seeing serenity. I will share them in future blogs. There is a point, however, when the sheer number of items defeats my best eye-deceiving strategies.
Good Reasons to Deplore Clutter
- Psychologically, clutter creates environments that worsen attention deficit disorder. Because clutter can feel like unfinished projects and being out-of-control, it increases self-reproach.
- Physically, we are more apt to lose our glasses, checkbook, and keys in cluttered environments. In a maze of clutter, it’s more difficult to keep the home clean. It also increases the hazard of tripping over the debris.
- Economically, clutter is a disaster. The increased cost of a disorganized U.S. household averages 15 to 20 percent. This includes late fees and last-minute premium prices. Clutter and too many possessions cause an estimated 40 percent more time on housework. (Reader Digest, May 2002.)
- Sociologically, the form of community clutter we call “litter” increases crime.
- Feng Shui and other Eastern thought see clutter impeding the flow of the life energy, chi.
- In the quantum world, the potentiality of energy is more important than the matter it turns into; Einstein referred to this power of space over things when he said, “There is no place in the new kind of physics both for the field and matter. For the field is the only reality.”
- An American koan reminds us that “less is more.” But when we shape clay into a pot, as the Tao Te Ching points out, it is the emptiness inside that holds things.
All well and good, but what if we want our pots to hold Martha’s onion soup?
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Here’s my best clutter-reducing tip: do as I say and not as I do! Practice better “magazine hygiene” than I have.
And, create an index. We save back issues because we can’t remember which one featured the article we want to remember. (Martha Stewart Living started publishing one in 2002 but stopped in 2005.) Or, immediately rip out the articles to keep. Staple them and slip them into the appropriately labeled envelope or file folder. Start now. Don’t wait twenty years like I did!
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