I am off work today to honor Martin Luther King Jr. I wonder how many people actually know that this January federal holiday is remembering Martin’s birthday. I also wonder how long it will remain a federal holiday. I have heard moans about Juneteenth and a disturbing resurgence of saying Columbus Day over Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I have never once heard the current loonies espouse anything but racist invective about civil rights and economic parity and non-violence and all the other good things Dr King believed in and worked to embody. So, if they manage to stick around for a while, I imagine we’ll lose this mid-January Monday holiday. Or, worse, it will be renamed in remembrance of our country’s last Presidential inauguration. (I also worry that Epiphany is going to be remembered as the day the apes stormed the Capitol…. my apologies, the day that peace-living citizens decided to take a stroll through Washington and were accosted by the police… It was only happenstance that they all came armed… and dressed up for something between a black ops and a New Age men’s spirituality retreat.)
But I am still staunchly ignoring things south of here. I’m paying attention to things west… But mostly I am doubling down on being local. Taking care of this place. And this is the time of year to clean the house! I like to have most of it done by Candlemas, so I am not bogged down by cleaning when I want to start the garden tasks. I am free from wage work today; and, as yesterday was the dark moon, my one day of the month that I reserve for rest and proper exercise and taking care of my aging body, I didn’t do much housework over the weekend. Ergo today, I’m addressing that.
There are reasons for cleaning in the winter. Or really at all. It’s not because we don’t like disorder and mess. Or not only that. It’s more that dirty things don’t last as long. There are thousands of microbes and billions of bacteria in every smear of soil and every droplet of water, most of which exist explicitly to decompose matter. Ergo, dirty stuff rots. Old housewives probably didn’t know about microbes; however, they had ample experience with the breakdown of stuff to note that the cleaner something is the longer it lasts.
We’ve taken it to the opposite extreme now. Our cleaners are just as good at breaking down stuff as microbes, through too many or too few hydrogen atoms, acidic or caustic. Often we mix both, as when we use lye to break down the clogs in the drain and then use acidic bathroom cleaners to remove calcium deposits and soap rings. Further, much of what we are cleaning is composed of toxic compounds that are only nominally stable. For example, using caustic detergents on mostly plastic clothing breaks down the plastic fibers. So the effluvia from your washing machine is flooding your world with microplastics that are killing you — and everything else.
My goal is finding a happy medium. Remove the dirt mostly by keeping it outside. Wipe up spills. Use soaps where there are stubborn messes, but don’t worry too much about stains. These are largely organic residues and not likely to harm you. (Except for the fact that many dyes are also petrochemicals and therefore highly toxic even in small amounts.) Use detergents and acids only when you need to break things down, as in when you need to clean fatty or oily build-up or charred carbohydrates which are all rather insoluble in water. So, you need those cleaners to clean most ovens, for example, one of my least favorite tasks, but one that I used to find necessary at this time of year because the house is closed up tight and whatever mess is in the oven is stinking up the whole building. Sometimes for days.
However, this year I am saved that annual task. You may recall that my old oven died last summer the day the chiles showed up and needed roasting. My new oven has a drip tray that can be removed and cleaned in the sink. The one time that was necessary (the oil in an empty muffin cup boiled over and went everywhere) all I had to do was wait for it to cool and then wipe it clean with regular dish soap. Which, in my house, is based on Castile soap, olive oil, and does not have much lye left in it by the time it is done curing. Many Castile soap makers also use less caustic saponins like soybeans, oats and yucca (and, when I make it, soapwort). So the oven is still shiny and smell-free. Though today, it smells like pumpkin bread.
January cleaning usually revolves around putting away the last of Midwinter and moving forward to the season of Imbolg, spring in the belly — though not yet spring in actuality. Putting away Yule usually begins after Plough Monday, though it can start as early as Boxing Day with me boxing up the stuff that is strictly tied to Yuletide. But that is not much of my Midwinter decorating. Most is just winter — evergreens, pine cones, acorns and lots of sparkle and lights to mimic ice and starlight. I also have a Moon theme going on. Maybe it’s the dreamy long nights, but I find I am more drawn to moon-gazing in the deep winter than I am in the summer when it far more comfortable to see the Moon.
I have already put most of the decorations away and even dug out a few things for Imbolg. There are candles on the mantle in silver holders with a few silver vases filled with juniper and dried white rose buds. The jeweled snowflakes that adorn my Yule Mother’s altar are put away, replaced by a small vase of silk snowdrops and a few ceramic snowdrop buds that I found in the jewelry section of Jackalope years ago. Can’t imagine using these beads as actual jewelry as they are rather angular and large. And fragile. But they make a nice candle-ring on my morning meditation candle — which is now white.
I am taking down the last of the lights today. This year I put a couple strands of colored lights out front. It was nice, though not really my thing. But my neighborhood was so dark this year, I broke down and bought two cheap strands for my front spirea bushes. I planned on putting them away yesterday, but I discovered that the extension cords had been encased in ice. And I just wasn’t going to spend my dark moon rest day breaking that up. In the snow. And wind. So, getting them free is my chore for today.
I already have all the lights from inside packed up in plastic storage bags (keeps them from entangling with other things… mostly). It’s just the outdoor lights now. And then it will all go in bins in the attic to come out at the end of the year. Maybe. If I’m feeling up to another huge electric bill. Which… well, I can’t imagine feeling flush in less than twelve months, so probably not.
As part of the cleaning process, I roasted the last of the winter squash, a couple kabochas and a small blue Hubbard. I will be making this mash into empanada filling and perhaps a savory pie or two. But I also baked bread and used the squash to make more of my beta-carotene and goat cheese stew. This is a pan-full of oven-roasted carrots, sweet potatoes, red potatoes and gold beets mixed with steamed wild rice and boiled white beans in a base of goat cheese, vegetable broth and several cups of fresh roasted squash purée. I added my standard comfort herb mix of rubbed sage, thyme, allspice, turmeric, cumin and chile, in this case chipotle chile, which gives the whole pot a warm scent and a hot flavor, as well as deepening the color of the orange veg into a rich sunset russet. In this weather, I take whatever warmth I can get, real or imagined.
I am also going through the usual winter shedding right now. I’ve piled up all the clothes that I have not used enough to warrant space in my not exactly spacious closet. Each year I come up with a trash bag full, and it’s finally starting to make a dent on the closet space. I have extra hangers and enough space to move things back and forth now. But I still feel like I don’t use much of it. So there will undoubtedly be more shedding next year.
This year, I am also starting to clean out the piles of random stuff that was left behind by the former folks or dumped on me in the divorce. I have a milk crate brim-full of electrical cables that I can’t even fathom using. There are also many pails of paint, now fully hardened, in colors that aren’t even visible on my walls, as well as a half dozen rolls of wallpaper that must be buried under the bathroom and hall papers — because they’re not patterns that exist in my house. I also have two bins of cotton fabric left over from the bookstore. We made it in to bookmarks. All this fabric has been cut into squares that perfectly fit the bookmark-making process, but are not at all useful for anything else except maybe quilting. Only, these are mostly kid fabrics in unruly colors and prints. They’d make eye-watering quilts. Still, maybe someone can use it. I am tired of housing it. There are also a few things that might be repaired in someone else’s skilled hands. A couple window-unit air conditioners that don’t turn on, a couple fans, a toaster that needs a few new elements (and a much larger space than my kitchen), a couple brass bed frames, and one small heater that is just baffling me (I’m writing its glitching off to demonic possession… hope the local guys can exorcise it…). All these could be used after refurbishment, and I will never have a use for any of it. In fact, I didn’t buy any of it except the baffling heater… So… off to the ReSOURCE.
I do like getting rid of stuff, cleaning out the excess, but only if I feel that it will be used and not turned into trash. Especially toxic trash. If it seems like something toxic like electronics or plastic is just going to the landfill — and most of it is, recycling claims notwithstanding — I am more inclined to box it up and store it in my attic. (I have many strands of lights of Christmas Past…) The only exception to this is batteries. You can’t store those things, especially not in a space that gets very hot in the summer months. Batteries explode, you know. But even if they are kept cool, they still corrode and leak nasty acid all over everything. This is a conundrum… Because if they are going to leak nasty acid in the attic, they are going to leak nasty acid in the landfill, harming many more critters than what lives in my attic (most of whom I don’t want living in my attic, but that’s another issue). My solution to this is to simply not buy batteries if I can help it. I have batteries in the smoke detectors and in a few clocks. I have a couple flashlights, one in the kitchen and one in the basement, though I can’t remember the last time that I used one. And that’s it for acid-based batteries. There are, of course, other solid-state batteries in the phone and this computer and the thermometers in my kitchen and medicine cabinet. I can’t say I have ever replaced those. I don’t actually know how in the case of the thermometers.
I also do not get rid of stuff that I might use again. The clothes that I am shedding have not been worn in at least a year. Mostly they are things that I don’t want to wear, maybe never did want to wear, things that are too young for my staid and sober age (ha…), or things that were given to me as gifts and I only ever wore them to assuage guilt. Maybe. Once. I also don’t generally get rid of books or music or movies because if I buy it once I usually return to it again and again and again. And until last year, I hadn’t shed kitchen tools. Because who knows when some thing is going to be essential to a recipe I want to try, and how will I ever find it again?
But I think I can reasonably expect to never need any of the cake stands I donated last year. I will certainly not buy one again, and that is the principal motivation in keeping stuff that I am not using now but may use again in the future. To eliminate the need to buy it again. I don’t want to buy stuff. I can’t afford it, but more importantly the planet can’t afford it. Also, who knows, but I might be able to creatively repurpose this thing that is not serving me well in its original function. Truly, I think that is why the cake stands showed up in the first place. My bookstore hosted Fancy Nancy tea parties with some regularity, and I used the cake stands in the book displays… and for piles of petits fours, which are, of course, necessary for a Fancy Nancy tea party.
I don’t like buying things, but I also don’t like the things that are available to be bought these days. It is impossible to find quality in an economy that is trying to maintain profits by cutting costs on materials and labor while other costs — especially transport — are rising everywhere. Whatever you buy through the market, no matter how much you spend, it’s going to be crap. It will not be what you think you bought. It will not work as you think it should. It will not last a year. And it will be mostly plastic. So when it breaks, it is permanently toxic trash. This is not a recipe for happiness. I honestly don’t know what people mean by shopping therapy…
For example… over the last two years, I have been buying clothes for banking. It has been an exercise in frustration. First, the kind of places I prefer to shop locally do not sell banking clothes. They sell off-beat, largely hand-made, comfortable clothes. This is Vermont, after all. And all my existing wardrobe was from New Mexico… even more not banking.
So I’ve been buying from online sources (I refuse to shop at Walmart and Kohl’s which are really the only box options here). But even when I shop from the most responsible and trustworthy vendors I can find and pay far more than I’d like, I am usually getting crap. The buttons fall off, the zippers are put in crooked and break, and there seems to be a general lack of seam stitching. Sweaters, especially, can just fall apart into their constituent pieces like they have leprosy.
And then there are the sizes… First, vanity sizing means that the numbers you see mean NOTHING. Second, while a 1950s size-12 might now be labeled a size-6, it is not going to fit a size-12 body like it did in the 1950s. Material cost-cutting has led to very strange material fabric-cutting. Where there used to be darts and godets to accommodate rounded bodies, because no body is linear, that extra work and extra fabric are now gone. This is particularly apparent in sleeves. Few winter coats have sleeves that will fit over a sweater because the sleeves actually are a size-6 on a size-12 coat. And they are perfectly cylindrical, a rolled up rectangle, same diameter from wrist to shoulder. Which would be funny, if it weren’t so expensively useless.
However, I finally found a coat that fits over bulky sweaters. Where? In the men’s section… It’s actually a trench coat made by one of the better historical costumers and modeled after the wool coat worn by Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes. It was also not one of the more expensive attempts at a winter coat. So… I feel this is all win… And I can donate the losers.
But on average… This culture makes trash. Intentionally. Trash is nearly all there is for sale. So I hate buying new stuff. I would rather hold on to the stuff I have and hope to repurpose it. Or if I have nothing that approximates a need, I like to find old things in vintage shops and antique stores. My house is full of old stuff. Including me… I like it that way. It is filled with stories and memories and calming textures and colors.
I also have very little plastic. I was part of Friends of the Earth back in the late 80s when they first started the no-plastic campaign. You could say I was an early adopter to that ideology. It helped immensely that I never liked the plastic aesthetic. I don’t much like anything Modern, really. Too cold. Too hard. Too many sharp edges that find your shins in the middle of the night. But plastic is ugly. It smells funny. It has a nasty texture. And it looks wrong. Too smooth. Too fake. Too… plastic. So when I found out that it was also poison that lasted for centuries, spreading harm throughout the biosphere, and that it was a byproduct of oil refining, the stuff that was polluting the atmosphere and heating up the planet and causing social chaos in the Middle East, and that it was more or less dumped on us by industrialists who quite blatantly wanted to keep the war economy going by making disposable product, that is, trash, I was only too happy to jump on that bandwagon. No plastic for me…
But it is very hard to avoid these days. Everything is made of plastic. Everything is trash. So I hate shopping. I keep what I have working as long as it will, and I buy old stuff that somebody else has kept working, or refurbished to work anew. Keeping things working means keeping them clean, as well as in good repair. It means using them gently. And sometimes keeping things from becoming trash is just keeping things in a box in the attic. Maybe someday someone smarter than us will have figured out how to deal with our toxic messes…
I just hope they’re also able to take on the toxicity in Washington…
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 