almost-Spring Cleaning
Sat, Feb 6 2010
| Laurie
I think it was in a Braziers Park newsletter some time last 
year there was an inventory from a clean-out of the barn or another outbuilding that was really evocative. Laid out like poetry, it suggested volumes of hidden histories in a (long) list of brief lines, the secret stories of the voiceless objects unearthed for reburial somewhere else. This came back to me recently listening to reports from a Cleaning of the Furniture Store, along with a very real sense of relief that I hadn't been involved. (It's not that the enormity of the task was daunting, although it most certainly was, so much as the knowledge that most of the rejected items would've ended up in my room rather than at the recycling centre or the charity shop. It's hard to let go, and comforting to have a space for all the things you don't want or need but feel deep down are part of you somehow. In Japan it's not uncommon for long-used and discarded items to take on lives of their own: I can't help but thinking of the old-mattress- and strangers-photograph-spirits we've sent out into the world with this big clean.)
Anyway, thanks to the efforts of Sean and Simon and Catherine and Ali, the furniture store is once again a room you can walk all the way through and see what's stored there. To celebrate, here's a cute photo of Catherine and Ali hard at work. This is also a chance to mark the date, in case anybody's curious to see how long it takes to fill up again.
year there was an inventory from a clean-out of the barn or another outbuilding that was really evocative. Laid out like poetry, it suggested volumes of hidden histories in a (long) list of brief lines, the secret stories of the voiceless objects unearthed for reburial somewhere else. This came back to me recently listening to reports from a Cleaning of the Furniture Store, along with a very real sense of relief that I hadn't been involved. (It's not that the enormity of the task was daunting, although it most certainly was, so much as the knowledge that most of the rejected items would've ended up in my room rather than at the recycling centre or the charity shop. It's hard to let go, and comforting to have a space for all the things you don't want or need but feel deep down are part of you somehow. In Japan it's not uncommon for long-used and discarded items to take on lives of their own: I can't help but thinking of the old-mattress- and strangers-photograph-spirits we've sent out into the world with this big clean.)Anyway, thanks to the efforts of Sean and Simon and Catherine and Ali, the furniture store is once again a room you can walk all the way through and see what's stored there. To celebrate, here's a cute photo of Catherine and Ali hard at work. This is also a chance to mark the date, in case anybody's curious to see how long it takes to fill up again.
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