For Cupcakes, With Love and Squalor

Or is it just "A Perfect Day for Cupcakes" instead? (Hey, is J.D. Salinger still alive up there in the Cornish hills?) I've been in the midst of self-created squalor of late (well, my office mainly--would you like a photograph? I can email it off-line so you'll believe me). There are many people who live here in squalor, their lawns (that isn't exactly the right word--more like disheveled patches or small unkempt fields) are littered with trash and junk. I guess when it overflows from the trailer or the falling-down house, it just takes up residence for all the world to see. I am not judging these people for I am of their kind and I am rather fascinated by what makes one person neat by nature and what makes someone else an inherent slob. [I even recall my school desks: one classmate's was always particularly neat and tidy, as was her room at home; mine was like it had been bombed by an M-80.]

I have always been an open squalor kind of person. Not one to shove things into drawers or closets, my junk and clutter is there on every flat surface including the floor. I am an honest clutterer and I come by this trait honestly, too. I hail from a long line of clutterer-pilers from some family members in the paternal realm and recognize it as a syndrome. Clutter is, as others far neater than I have said on Oprah, "put off decision-making." While, yes, I am a procrastinator extraordinaire, I am, at least, a clean clutterer. While it tends towards a bit dusty at times, I do know how to throw out old food and garbage and do dishes several times a day. I also love to do laundry. It's the paper and ephemera and "stuff" where I fall way short. Perhaps, now that I am out of an historic New England villager where appearances were everything--and deceiving at times--I am just letting myself go. I hope not but that might be part of this psychology.

I bring this rather depressing topic up now as it seems to coincide with acute cabin fever. While I'm swimming in my own miasma and detritus of kept items, too many books (yes, one can have too many), things to be filed, and things undone (and yes, I still don't feel settled and maybe my "putting off of sorting the clutter" is my way of avoiding feeling settled--we may as well bring out the pop psychology here while we're at it!), I feel a certain kinship with Perley Swett, the subject of this month's excellent Cupcake read. [Photo, above, from photo stream on Flickr of Sheila Swett Thompson, author of Perley: The True Story of a New Hampshire Hermit, a biography of her grandfather.] Perley chose to live separately after a series of unfortunate events in his life. He lived in a house that had been in his family for 100 years and, in true pack-rat fashion, threw little away or made do with what he had on hand.

In the past year we have taken an old Federal "McMansion" house (while it was old--built in 1813--it would have been a Federal-era McMansion), lived in for fifty years by the same family in New Hampshire and packed it into boxes without really sorting anything out first. It was filled with the stuff of many generations before that, topped off by our own stuff from the past twelve years of marriage and before. This large-amount-of-stuff-moving was enabled by the fact that we moved ourselves in not one but three box trailer containers. With the money we're saving hiring a moving company, we can afford to bring all of this stuff...at least that was our rationale then, even though, at the time, I sensed doom and a sea of unopened boxes for years. I should also mention that in almost 10,000 square feet of space in our former home, including attic, cellar, closets and barn, there was plenty of room to stash and store stuff: now it is more obvious even though those boxes are in a shed, a garage, another house (that doubles for guests) and now a shop. It's too much.

Meanwhile, I've never found a "place for everything" that I think we need in the double-wide so it spills over into my secret office off the bedroom (or gets thrown there) or deposited up at "the brick house" (eg. guest house/large climate-controlled storage unit--why pay rent for the unforeseeable future when you can buy your own storage facility and create equity?). This is supposed to be my sanctuary and instead it's my prison. I've also realized that, unlike our former home, here I do not yet know where everything is because it is either in boxes or holed away somewhere (in boxes) or in any number of piles that keep getting moved (very often in new boxes). This syndrome now has a name: compulsive-hoarding syndrome (yes, I have it for pantries, too) or disposophobia. I imagine Perley must have felt that way. Yet, as a self-imposed hermit, perhaps he felt freer than any one of his peers. He certainly could teach us a thing or two about frugality in these challenging economic times.

Clutter accumulates quickly when a family of pack-rats has lived continuously in the same house for over one hundred years. Letters, diaries, pictures, newspapers and magazines all ended up on Perley's large kitchen table which, at an earlier time, accommodated the entire Swett clan for Thanksgiving Dinner. By the time of my visit it was piled high in disarray. Yet Grampa had his own filing system and always knew exactly where everything was even though he never put his papers in order or threw anything away. He just kept piling more on top, much like a compost pile. Brought up to let nothing go to waste, Grampa even saved the interior wax paper wrapping from each box of Saltines the goats devoured. He used these to line his dinner plate, sparing himself the job of having to wash dishes.

From Perley: The True Story of a New Hampshire Hermit
by Sheila Swett Thompson

Despite my apparent need to be surrounded in clutter, I like to be home. I feel secure surrounded by these things and yet also unsettled by them. I imagine Perley did, at times, too. I am half-way through his biography and had to put it down the other night only because I had fallen asleep and awoke when the book dropped to the floor. Sheila Swett Thompson, Perley's granddaughter, has written a page turner and I am engrossed and saddened by the saga of this eccentric hermit man in the New Hampshire woods. I expect that the one thing that will persist with me long after I finish the book is a haunting sense of the realities--and personalities--behind old photographs. We tend to paint our rural heritage with a nostalgic brush, or at least I do, and Thompson's well-researched family saga proves that nothing is as it seems and that the past is often as sordid and unsettling as the present can be. It is a disquieting revelation, even for an historian like myself.

While on the eccentric-recluse-in-squalor bent, I am excited that Grey Gardens is coming to HBO on April 18th. It is a fictive remake of the original documentary (I wonder, has that ever been done before?) about the two Edie Beales (both mother and daughter) and their lives together at their ruinous summer house, Grey Gardens, in East Hampton, New York. The name of the house is apt and the original documentary is unforgettable and sad. At one point it was threatened with being condemned because of its decrepit, inhabitable state until Bouvier cousin Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and other family members, stepped in to fund basic repairs.



A few years ago, the Cupcakes watched the original documentary together and for a brief moment we were tying sweaters over our heads. This HBO film stars Drew Barrymore as "Little Edie" and Jessica Lange as "Big Edie" and from the promo Barrymore sounds pitch perfect in her role. Because of its cinematic focus, the film will be able to weave in and out of their more glamorous and privileged past in flashback moments not seen in the documentary. (It will also likely document the making of the documentary to some degree.) I imagine that the ability to recreate the past in flashbacks will lend even more of a sad, strange poignancy to this dysfunctional tale of codependency.

The lives of Perley Swett, and the two Edie Beales, are cautionary tales that what's past is not necessarily prologue. We can lose it all in a moment: our place in the world, our status quo, our homes, our friends or families, our jobs, our looks, our health, or our lifestyle that we may have taken for granted. Above all, we can not lose what makes us who we are, even if all appearances are to the contrary. Perhaps people like Perley Swett and the Beales and other characters like them are as authentic as it gets: by shedding societal expectations and living life on their own terms. Sometimes change is good but sometimes it cries of a lonely despair. I'm glad I have Cupcakes, and other friends and family, and a roof over my head, even if underneath is chaos at times.

It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Little Edie Beale

If you're stuck, Edie, it's only with yourself.

Big Edie Beale