Oct 8, 2021 4 min read

Remember shabby chic? Remember the years, probably the late 90s, when it was fashionable to have worn, lumpy sofas and frayed curtains?

People were paying for faded chintz upholstery and taking chains to their wooden tables. Shelter magazines featured living rooms stuffed with pillows and blankets and so many things, things, things!

Harmless neglect was aspirational.

Back then, the most on-trend thing you could do was to do pretty much nothing. I remember, and I’m pining for a bit of that bygone aesthetic now.

My house has gone shabby, but not deliberately so, and not chic. As I write this in my office, the daybed behind me is heaped with my fall wardrobe, an amorphous heap of sweaters and corduroy waiting for me to approach it with hangers. Good luck with that, I tell my favorite sky-blue turtleneck.

Maybe next month.

This is what happens when I am in the final stages of a big project. I’m writing and overseeing editing of a documentary, a project that began with filming in June and, as always, has reached this final, fevered stage. All day, every day, I bang away at my computer keyboard like Van Cliburn on the concert stage.

Living alone, I’m responsible only to this project, my little dog and myself. Most days the dog, who because of health concerns can have only brown rice and chicken breast, eats better than I do. Even the cereal suppers I wrote about last week are beyond my reach this week, because I haven’t been able to get to the store to buy more milk.

The path from office to the kitchen is a gauntlet of folders and papers that I’ve dropped or set down on my way to the coffee.

Also, I’m low on coffee.

For the third week I forgot it was trash day and, instead of dragging the cans all the way up the driveway to the curb, I pulled the bags out of the can, loaded them into my car, and drove them up, a shortcut both lazy and smelly.

What is it about writing that returns me to my college days, when the work was not only the first thing, but the only thing I could manage? I look at the heap of towels in the corner and chastise myself for not taking 10 minutes to load them into the washer.

It’s been said that writers hate to write but love to have written, and that’s true. I’m not enjoying the physical and mental act of writing this column right now, but when I later read it for a final edit, I’ll have the satisfying sense of having completed something. Unfortunately, I don’t get the same satisfaction from doing laundry, or vacuuming or shopping, and that might be my missing link.

I once had an older relative who wasn’t bothered by clutter so long as each room contained one beautiful thing. There must be a bit of that on my gene strand because yesterday, I found a small, yellow flower in the yard. I picked it, put it in a little vase and placed it on the kitchen island. Stepping back to admire it, I decided that little blossom would compensate for all of the disorder around it.

The project will be done in another week or so. The next day, I’ll attack the heap of clothing, will get to the laundry and the sweeping, and I’ll go to the grocery store. I might even buy a big bunch of flowers.

My world will be back in order. Until the next project comes along to hijack it all over again.