Treasure all around

There is so much that comes into our lives, intended for such fleeting use.

Enter our apartment and the first thing you will see is trash. 

Our front door opens onto an abbreviated hallway, kitchen to the right and the rest of the apartment ahead. There’s a chair in this passageway, where you can sit to take off your shoes. Look closely as you sit down and you can see flecks of white paint on the wood. That’s the first hint.

Beyond the chair, in what is visible of our living room, you can see a small chest of drawers, with a glass vase on top sprouting a bouquet of feathers. You might notice the finish has flaked off the base of the stand. That’s your second hint.

When Roshni and I heard we’d been chosen for our current apartment, we were walking home from a couple of neighborhoods away. It was the first unfurnished apartment we had rented in Barcelona, so on our way back we paid a little more attention to the day’s castoffs. We found that paint-speckled chair in front of a dumpster. Our coffee table too. The chest of drawers I found later, pulling drawers from a disordered pile to reassemble it. Other people’s trash became our treasure. Or, at least, our furnishings.

Our living room, filled with other people’s castoffs.

We bought furniture, too, though all of it was secondhand. (The exception: our mattress.) But the collection of objects that visitors see upon coming through the front door are a fitting introduction to our apartment – and to our approach to life. I love finding new uses for any attractive thing that passes into our hands.

Take that chest of drawers. A former bottle of Roshni’s favorite fancy tonic water holds a cutting, and a secondhand tea mug-turned-micropot features a succulent. The cork cup that holds loose change once held a candle. The balsa wood tray where I drop my wallet and keys came home from the supermarket full of fruit. The snarl of wood we discovered on a beach somewhere. The vase and feather duster are, well, Roshni’s finds.

I find something deeply satisfying about meeting everyday needs — a pot for this plant, a place to empty my pockets — not with purchases but with creative reuse. There is so much that cycles through our lives, intended for such fleeting use. Invite it to stay a while. The bottle that holds one half of your gin and tonic might make a good vase. That paper bag, with a salvaged ribbon, can be used for a future gift.

I get this impulse from my mother, and from hers as well. My grandmother (perhaps yours too?) was a master of reuse. Undoubtedly shaped by living through the Great Depression, she saved twisty ties and plastic planter pots and yogurt containers. It was, in part, a learned economic necessity. She had to stretch her truck driver husband’s limited earnings and, after their divorce, her own slim earnings as an art teacher. 

My mom carried on these traditions, in her own ways. She frequented a thrift store in town that was then named, in the classic tradition of secondhand shop puns, Saks Thrift Avenue. (No resemblance to the New York luxury department store.) She was far more delighted in a good thrift store find — look what I found! — than in something bought new. Roshni can confirm that spirit lives on in me. 

She did not talk about climate change — nor did anyone else during my childhood that I can remember — but she was disturbed by waste. The accelerating throwaway culture in those years disturbed and sometimes infuriated her. She frequented appliance repair shops and shoe cobblers. She knew that fixing what you had would mean one less thing manufactured for purchase — and one less item decomposing (or more likely not) in a landfill. 

But this responsibility should not — cannot, if we are to actually change — rest on our individual shoulders. We need companies to be responsible for the full lifecycle of what they create, for governments to require producers to pay for or process their own waste. Right now, society pays the price tag for all the plastic crap accumulating in landfills, subsidizing billion-dollar companies' ability to produce things that often cannot be repaired or reused. 

We need to move towards an ethic of, as the title of a seminal book put it, Cradle to Cradle. Mother Nature has that mastered. We should follow her lead. Right now, our culture still sees beauty in the new, the fresh, the untouched. But what if we celebrated the thoughtfully repurposed, the reimagined, the old made new? Sure, there is a time for new things. But right now we are drowning in them.

What writing this has pushed me to do is send some money out in support of that change. I hope we can move at the speed of policy, not just culture, because time is running short. I hope we can craft policies that favor reuse, and penalizes businesses premised on throwaway culture.

In the meantime, I try my best to model the world I’d like to see. I look for a second life for the wonders that come into my life, whether by turning discarded drawers into organizing trays, or pastry bags into compost liners. When friends come over for dinner and compliment our apartment, I tell them that we picked up some of our furniture off the street, and the rest at secondhand shops. And then I send them home with leftovers in a carefully scrubbed takeout container. 

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What’s your favorite thing to reuse or repurpose? Do tell.

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drop | Reuse something. Carry home that curbside chair. Turn that sexy bottle into a vase. Give something new life.

ripple | For instance, this Nov. 4 repair fair in Petaluma looks cool.

wave | Support advocacy. Donate to a group trying to change our relationship with waste. I chose Reuse Alliance. 

Are you knowledgeable about the reuse movement? Tell us who you recommend.

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a chair on a highway on a rainy afternoon | excerpt

a velvet chair
standing by itself
	      on a highway
a chair standing by itself on a highway
means its life is over
a life of ups and downs
	       before it was brought here
		             and left beside the grass

– p.k.

Read in full at poets.org

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This newsletter is a collective project. My editor in chief is Roshni Kavate and my proofreader is Steve Kay.