Sweeper 1746, Etching with some engraving Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953 MMA 53.600.588(56)
This is how we’ve spent our time off: quite a bit of cooking, though I did much in advance (the oven is large enough to cook only a turkey and nothing else, at one time), and even more cleaning and clearing and rearranging. After all, my mother will arrive in three weeks, which is not very much time at all when you have working weekends along the way.
with any luck, there will be a tidied up office/ironing room in which I could sew out of the way of certain felines, but at this point I’d settle for folded laundry and calmer cats. They remain convinced that cleaning is an exercise in cat assassination, though they can offer no proof that any cats have ever succumbed to death by vacuum cleaner.
Servant Girl Plucking a Chicken
Follower of Nicolas Bernard Lépicié, French, 1735–1784
MFA Boston, 65.2650
Living history, reenacting, historic costuming: whatever you want to call what we do most weekends, it runs to a lot of gear, in the end. The year we took my mother to Fort Lee, she remarked on how much baggage we had. “You’ve got lives in two centuries,” she said, and it’ true. We just about do. So how to store all that stuff, while making more and improving what you do have, is a challenge. Most reenactors I know have somewhat cluttered houses, or at the least houses where the historical items are integral to the decor. That is probably the most rational tactic, since most of us love what we do and enjoy how chairs or mugs remind us of fun, if challenging, weekends.
We have tried to be ruthless this weekend chez Calash, channeling deaccession rules (duplicate? unrelated? irrelevant? away it goes!) and hoping that when we are done we will have only what is necessary, useful, and beautiful. Or, at the least, a clean house to survive my mother’s eye.
Kitty Calash 
Ok. Total heresy here, as I hate to throw away anything that might serve its turn in some future production, and have many cases of throwing out something,only to buy its replacement shortly afterwards! We have staved off the worst of the clutter by raising up the bed, creating a space underneath just the height of those handy plastic bins! Dusty, yes. Do I always know what’s under there? No, but I come pretty close. Dare I corrupt chez Calash?
Auntie N. also known as the Queen of Packrattia
The terrible thingis, we have already stashed things under the bed, and under the dresser, and under the night table. (There is one useful closet in this place!) Much of what has gone has been donated, and most of it was clothes that no longer fit the kid, board games he’s grown out of, things like that. Sad to see his childhood packed up, but it’ll do someone else a great deal more good.
I cannot live to your standards, fair Kitty. My house has only recently been somewhat reclaimed from the Great Navy Wool Reckoning of 2013, and I have many miles to go. Redundancy and clutter are a way of life for me. I never met a book I didn’t hoard, and my fabric stash is rife with items like “that cream floral print fabric for an 1830’s dress someday… No the OTHER cream floral print fabric for an 1830’s dress someday.” However, like a proper voyeur, I thrive off of insight into the organizational success of others. I hope the Chez Calash becomes “neat and dainty as a flower… [despite] no servant at all at present”, as the divine Ms. Livingston Hill would say.
Speaking for my own slovenly ways, I can solemnly attest that my house has never been as clean as it was on the day my mother came for dinner 6 years ago.
Oh, only a few of the books have gone; I think we frightened the moving estimator when we moved from STL and that was 13 years of accumulation ago! I did rejoice in sending away a very boring tome on the War of 1812… And still have all my fabric and yarn and all the hundreds of books we really like. It’s an annual event, this visit, and last year I lost track of my sewing stuff by waiting too long to clear away the sewing room/dining room and having to swoop it off the table and counter into Whole Foods bags and down to the basement! The best visit was the year I had hip surgery and cleaned up weeks in advance: lesson learned, maybe.