Tag Archives: thrift

Carpets fresh and clean.

May 27, 2026bees, creativity, home, my gardenborage, G.K. Chesterton, housework, mock orange, Pentecost, squash, thriftGretchenJoanna

The most encouraging news of the day is, the sun is shining, and the garden is growing. There is already a little Delicata squash on one of the two plants I started from seed in March.

I hired a man to clean about half of my wall-to-wall carpets. Last night and this morning I pushed and hauled furniture around so that I could thoroughly vacuum all the places beforehand. “Kyle” came this morning and was a very conscientious worker with a good deal of experience, and also lots of information for me about the various fibers he’d be cleaning, and how carpets wear, and how stains are removed. He told me that he usually vacuums himself, and was reluctant to skip that step. He asked if I had a good vacuum…? I do, but I let him do that part everywhere again with his machine, for his peace of mind.

I am so happy to have this job done. I don’t have pets, and all the grandchildren have been trained by their parents to remove their shoes in the house, so my rugs get along without frequent shampooing (this is an understatement which I won’t elaborate on); but I had reasons for deciding that this was the time.

While this thorough maintenance was happening over the course of several hours, I cooked up a pot of split pea soup; I roasted eggplant, toasted walnuts and made a batch of quinoa. The flannel bedsheets went into the washer and were replaced with the summer type, and I checked off several other tasks around the house, some of which have been delayed a couple of weeks, and some for months. It’s uncanny how every time I whittle down my to-do list, a few more things break or come due for maintenance.

Checking off the carpet cleaning, which should have been done years ago, felt really good. But — there was a little problem, which immediately added another task to my list. A solution that Kyle used, on a spot barely visible before, reacted with something I evidently used sometime in the past, and left a bleach mark in the middle of my hall. I usually only use water on spots, because they are most often just garden dirt, and I have no memory what it was I put there. Anyway, I will be contacting someone who can patch it, and I’ll have to take a piece from the back of a closet in order to match it. It will probably look fine, and anyway, people are not taking time to notice the carpet when they are walking down the hall. It will give me the pleasure of checking one more thing off the list — yay!

This Sunday we Orthodox will celebrate Pentecost, and I am getting excited thinking about the day. We decorate with greenery of all kinds; in our temple it’s often whole trees that are brought in for the feast, and in some parishes around the world they cover the floor with grass and wildflowers.

The thought of decorating the church floor takes me back to my new problem of an ugly spot on my floor. It makes me think about how many times I covered a stain on some garment or bath mat, etc, with embroidered flowers. My mind did immediately go in that direction when I saw the small bleached area in the carpet, wondering (very briefly) if there were a comparable fix that I could accomplish in a homey DIY way. It’s not easy to give up doing those creative things, especially when Chesterton’s words linger in my mind: “Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance… But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative….”

I’m so happy that I can still be creative in the kitchen and garden. That is about all the creativity I have time for anymore! The borage (pictured just above) is blooming and the bees are loving it; they don’t mind having to hang upside down to drink. So many things are blooming, but I will just show you one more, the mock orange. Two bushes were planted on either side of my patio so that their scent would drift across the space where one might sit of a spring evening. Alas, spring evenings aren’t conducive to being outdoors in this neighborhood, neither does this particular mock orange have a strong scent; I have to put my nose right in the flower to detect it. So nothing is lost! And the loveliness of these flowers to the eye is great wealth. Thank you, Lord.

Poetic cooking while in fetters.

September 7, 2018art, creativity, food and cooking, quotesbanana bread, freedom, George Braque, limitations, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Browning, thrift, waste, Winston ChurchillGretchenJoanna

Since my husband’s death three years ago I’ve had three long-term housemates. Two of them have moved on, so that Susan and I are the only ones here, just two of us using the cupboards and large freezer space. This situation dovetails with my own less-burdened mind, which now is able to grasp:

Yes! The obvious thing is to clean out the larder, use up the food, and start planning and cooking interesting meals with all the bits of this and that squirreled away. Facing up to what is unusable is part of the process; the soup that got lost in the back of the freezer for too long is one of the hidden costs associated with huge life changes, and is not a cause for guilt.

Chesterton’s wisdom on creativity always helps me: Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance… economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure.

The most prosaic thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare.

Another development since I returned from India is that I can’t go back to the weird eating habits I had fallen into as soon as I no longer had anyone to cook for routinely. Eating normally and very tastily for eight weeks cured me forever, I think, of my go-to frozen chopped spinach that I had been eating as the main part of every meal. Yesterday I used the last of it with a little container of likewise defrosted meaty red sauce and a (fresh) egg, to make a perfect breakfast:

These limitations I have placed on myself made me remember other things Chesterton said about art and painting and limits, and that led me on an interesting path through fields of quotes on the topic. Talk about limits and people will argue that they only exist in your mind, and must be “dropped,” if you are “to go beyond them into the impossible.” Even Winston Churchill is reported to have said, “The vistas of possibility are only limited by the shortness of life.” But he wasn’t trying to get dinner on the table in an hour.

Modern man seems especially prone to this delusion, but there are many sage exceptions, like Robert Browning: “So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!”

In matters of food and cooking, even if you had unlimited money you have limited time, and limits on whom you might find to prepare the ingredients, the choice of which is always limited to some degree, and on and on. I know you all know these things; this is my philosophical rambling you’re reading.

I am not advocating for an unhealthy fear of trying something new, but actually the opposite. As George Braque said, “It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.”

And though Richard Diebenkorn was talking about painting, this word from him is empowering when considered at the beginning of any creative work: “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.”

Yesterday I found several very ripe bananas in the freezer, and I did not want to waste them, even if their monetary value at purchase was minimal. You can imagine what they looked like after being there for a while; I’m sure I couldn’t have found a neighbor who wanted them. Anyway, part of my “style” is to stay home. I avoid going shopping, and knocking on doors for any reason. If only I had got my hoped-for worm bins set up, I would have given them to the worms!

But various baking supplies were sitting in the refrigerator begging to be used, so I put everything together into an unusual banana bread. It started from a “paleo” recipe with almond flour, but when I substituted egg replacer for the eggs I created a Grain-Free Vegan Chocolate Chip Banana Bread.