Know yourself

[photopress:Piggy.JPG,full,pp_image]Know yourself. It hurts less that way. I’ve never had anything but trouble when I’ve tried to be anything different except on stage.

It starts in my kitchen. It lately became more chaotic than even I can deal with, because there are new objects and new comestibles. They come, one by one, and each in itself doesn’t present a problem and I can find a nook or a corner for it. But over a short time you can be tempted to get another, then another, and before you know it, there’s a slum in the corner of your kitchen.

This time it was silicone baking dishes. They’re cheap here. Hmmm. They don’t burn you when you touch them. Nice. Oooohh, look! Here’s a darling shape I’ve never had before! Cute! I could use it instead of muffin tins! Then you see muffin tins and buy those too. A bundt cake form, a cake tin that can double for a pie plate, can you see what I mean? They made a pile in my pantry cupboard back in the dark and took away the room I needed for staples and special ingredients. When I tried to find one I hunted by touch and pulled out bunches of stuff before I got what I wanted and that stuff didn’t get re-organized, either. The pantry was a mess. Often the one I pulled out was warped and had to be filled with warm water to reshape it. That’s a pain in the neck.

So I pulled them all out one day and put them on a chair in the kitchen. My thinking was that if I had to look at that pile all the time, sooner or later I’d figure out what to do next, but time dragged on and they eventually had to be washed to get the dust off them and they were still in a pile in the kitchen.

One day last week I noticed that a deep drawer had developed an empty space. The drawer above it had been infected with weevils and needed cleaning out. So I did the dirty work of removing everything, dumping it into a sack for Olga’s hens, and scrubbing all the containers and then the drawer itself to be bug free. When the new things were put into the drawer, it was suddenly more spacious. So I cleaned the lower drawer. And it too became roomier. Now what was it that I needed a space for? Ahhh, yes. The silicone stuff. It wouldn’t fit. But the space looked big enough for the pile of ceramic casseroles behind the pot lids! Yes! Wow—look at that! But if I put the silicone pieces behind the lids on that dark upper shelf, I’d never see them again. Where’s the gain in that? If you don’t see it, you won’t use it.

I measured what was on the brighter and more accessible lower shelf—just possible. Out everything came and the cupboard washed out, in went the stockpots and the Dutch oven and the salad washer and behind them the pasta roller. Next to them went the gigantic lids that don’t fit in the lid rack. Yes!

The silicone went at the rear of the bottom and I slid the rack, which looks like a toast rack for a behemoth, then filed the lids in a row in that. And there was space left over, so I pulled out the cooling racks and the Italian toaster and racked those too. And gained room in the drawer under the oven for my Wasa wafers to keep them crisp. I was some kind if pleased with me.

I walked away feeling like a champion, and thought, “I could do that to the whole kitchen; rethink every part and make it all neat.” Well, yes, I could. If I were someone else, I could and probably would.

The truth is that as I thought about it I realized that I would rather be staked out on an ant hill or set loose in a forest with nothing but a match. The vision of pulling everything I own into the middle of the floor and shopping for organized space for each thing, meanwhile, of course, scrubbing out every cupboard at once was appalling. I can do two, three maybe and feel great. I even pull out the used-once-year extra champagne flutes from the tiptop and wash and polish them—once a year. I use a stepladder and leap over the sink to the big counter space behind it to do a really good job on everything back there—knife rack, dish rack, window, beams and the mask of a pig—twice a year. I get in there and go at every single part as I need to, but I never pull it all apart at once. I have this deep-seated fear that something will happen and I will never get it back to usable again.

If you don’t understand how someone could have cleared a 4000 square foot house, divided the shippable from the not needed, had a gigantic auction, packed up 6200 pounds of stuff and moved it all to a foreign country where her grasp of the language was 400 years out of date, join the crowd. I don’t know why I can’t do this.
The important and operational thing is to realize that I can’t do it. Maybe I used up all those skills doing it once.

There are people who sanitize their garbage bins every week. Bless them. Others iron Jockey shorts, socks and washcloths. (They’re nuts.) I read recently that there’s a woman who goes up to her bedroom every night, turns the bed down and sprinkles it with lavender, places a full carafe of water with its matching glass on the bedside table, then opens the window and closes the door, this all before dinner, so that when she goes to bed, it is all perfect. I would just go to a hotel if I had those standards.

I think my best recourse is to celebrate that we are all different and all wonderful. If I can get that into my mind I might even be able to skip washing that pig mask this spring. Except that I don’t think it is wonderful to have a plastic pig face coated with oil and dust from cooking.