How Young is Too Young for a China Cabinet
Yesterday morning I bid on a china cabinet. Fingers crossed no one outbids me, because if not, next weekend I’ll be driving down to Laurel to shell out a hundred bucks for a 20th century Georgian style china cabinet for my dining room. I’ll finally have a place to keep the old china my mother keeps showing up at my doorstep with, somewhere to stash the cookbooks I’ve been meaning to crack open again, and maybe a little space for a few more jadeite dishes, a little more vintage glassware.
I bid on a bookcase, too. Not exactly a steal, but it would be nice to have because it’s sturdy and oak and yes, I do still have three bins of books in the shame closet downstairs (plus the one in the trunk of my car that my mother cobbled together from the books stashed in corners of my parents house). Maybe I’ll finally have every book on display for the first time in years.
The china cabinet is what excites me though. I’ve wanted one since I moved into this house, not only because I love the look of a china cabinet, but because I have so little storage space and so many dishes for entertaining that I seem to keep accidentally collecting (again, my mother is no help here).
I wonder, though, if it’s silly, or a waste of time. To simplify it, am I too young to want, nay, need a china cabinet this badly?
I dated someone recently who told me his plan when he moved to a bigger city was to have nothing but the barest of essentials. Just a mattress, a chair, no internet. Just a TV with a DVD player so he could watch movies from the library. It sounded practically monastic, but it sounded cheap. “Maybe I should be more like that,” I wondered. I’d have more money if I was like that, probably.
I sometimes wonder if my desire to nest, to fill my home with things I care about, my concern to mold the space in the way that I like, I wonder if it’s a foolish endeavor, if my time could be spent better elsewhere. I worry about that all the time nowadays: “Is this the best way I could be spending my time? My money?” Is it a waste, considering this is a temporary living situation, though I know not how long “temporary” will be? Is it silly to try to collect things at twenty-six that you think will last you a long time when your life is decidedly in flux? I wonder about my friends who make it a practice to keep their possessions limited to what they can move in a car.
I, unfortunately, have a very small car.
I worry often about being materialistic, but I try to check in with myself every month or so. Is this item necessary? Am I using it? Do I have affection for it? I think I’ve gotten pretty good at understanding what I do and don’t need. My worst tendency towards impulse buying is books, because it’s always been books, but I’ve gotten very good at knowing what I won’t read that’s been hanging around for a while, so I sort through them once a year or so to purge.
I think, what it comes down to, is my relationship to objects and memory. I like the objects in my home because they tell me a story. They chart change. They hold pieces of the past. I still have my copy of Freedom that an ex-boyfriend gave me with a terrible note written inside (“It’s about two people who are also doomed.”) because I do still kind of plan to read it, but also because the note reminds of a period in my life that I’ve moved far away from. And it makes me laugh, of course. My record cabinet reminds me of every space I’ve ever lived in. My dishware has history I don’t know about, and that excites me every time I use it. It excites me because I found it, or my mother found it, and the finding itself is a story to me.
I don’t need everything in my house to come with me to every new place I live. I don’t need every piece to have a long history or deep significance. But I like being surrounded by objects that remind me of periods in my life. I like using things that I have chosen deliberately, not picked up out of some brutish, forced necessity. It gives me less joy to use my things that way.
So maybe it is a little silly, to be so concerned about what enters my home and takes up space in it. But I think it’s also a practice of consideration for myself, of remembering. I could live in an empty room with a mattress and a chair and I would have more money for cocktails and trips to New Orleans, but then, would coming home really make me happy? I have, for so many years, come home to spaces that made me profoundly unhappy, so much so that I burrowed into the beds of boyfriends and lovers. Why shouldn’t I indulge a little bit, in this experiment of creating a space that feels good to come home to? Isn’t that teaching me a little something about myself? Maybe there’s nothing wrong with beginning to collect at this moment. Maybe it’s important to begin that practice of thought early, to bring something into your home that you may keep, and then at forty-four, you can be reminded of yourself at twenty-six.