Category Archives: Wendy Welch

The Monday Book: THE YEAR OF LESS by Cait Flanders

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Janelle Bailey brings us the Monday book this week.

The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store by Cait Flanders


I had not heard anything about this book, but it was available through Libby to be my next walking “listen,” and I have come to enjoy, more so, non-fiction while walking than fiction…though I’m not certain I have quite figured out why.
So very much of this book and Flanders’ ideas resonated very strongly with me and my own experiences, and yet I think that I have even more to say about some of what she said than she did say here. I wonder whether it’s time to just write that one…myself.

Janelle Bailey’s pick this week


Oh, do I ever have in my possession numerous things–mostly clothing but some other as well…yes, books, too, but those DO give me joy–for the life I think I’m supposed to one day live. How dumb is this? I find this especially challenging to address currently, as I’m torn between–will this now be my “new” annual and seasonal “work” wardrobes and routine, still working from home (and for the past sixteen months)? Or will there be a time when I will wish to wear, again, dress pants and heavier sweaters, for instance? I have no idea. But if I addressed things either as Flanders does or as Marie Kondo does, all of it should go. I struggle with that…and it’s mostly silly, I suppose. And truly: I could/should just let go of the “skinny” clothes that don’t just fill the drawers and closet waiting for them to fit again but also fill me with some sort of tacit stress and anxiety–possibly constantly–to make them fit again. It’s so silly!
I appreciate Flanders’ approach to these various “issues” in her life and how Flanders has created as projects and blogged about them her sobriety, her paying off of significant ($30,000) debt, and now, in this book, her “shopping ban.”
There was just so much that she said that makes tremendous logical and rational sense and with which I could identify…mostly if looking from the outside “in” to my own closet and drawers, pantry, and other storage areas–a very full linen closet, for instance, that is rarely opened since it contains so many things for “when” they are needed…old sheets for costumes, for instance, that are never sought. So silly to store it all…and not use the linen closet for the “linens” used.
I was especially satisfied by Flanders’ storytelling and honesty–true sincerity–in its forthright telling and also by the data with which she began each new chapter: how many months she’d been sober, what percentage of her income she’d saved that month, and the percentage of the likelihood that she’ll complete this full year’s project, the actual shopping ban. I was with her, supportive, cheering her on from here…well, from my walking path…all the while that I “read” (listened).
And I will take her lessons learned into my near future. I will consider documenting it myself, as our circumstances are somewhat different: I’m in my early 50s, she then in her mid-30s;  she was single and childless, and I am married for the second time and have five children, three stepchildren, and two grandchildren; I have a houseful–ney, a house- and outbuildingful–of stuff that is not all even my own, though I suppose that all of the “baggage” is. Sigh. Sigh.
Sigh.
I will be thinking of this book and Cait Flanders’ success for some time to come for sure.

Adding Two Rooms to our Home

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Jack and I have a big back yard. We wound up fencing it into two halves because, chickens. The other day, I referred to “the outside room” and Jack didn’t ask what I meant, just said “inner room or outer room?”

Twenty-five years of marriage counts for something in the mind reading department, but we also came to this conclusion out of common sense. The backyard added two rooms to our home. The inner room is for gracious entertaining, has most of my light garden (solar stuff that’s so pretty at night) and the flowers. The outer room keeps the chickens, the main gardens, the fruit bushes and the nut trees. (Black walnuts are why we have two gardens; some plants is juglone safe, some ain’t. Juglone is the stuff black walnuts put out while their roots are down there in the wood wide web talking to each other. Never mind cats; it’s black walnuts as seek world dominance, y’all.)

Neither of us were ever big gardeners. We grew heirloom tomatoes because I love to try blue and purple and green and yellow things that “should be” red. We grew potatoes because Jack is Scottish, and if you’re a gardener in Scotland, you are talking root vegetables. Gardening in that country takes place August 10-15.

Jack and I have always enjoyed turning something into nothing–which is an upscale way of saying “how cheaply can we do this?” We put down leftover fertilizer bags to kill weeds, dug up rocks to weight and drain tomato buckets, and otherwise tried to keep from growing veggies that cost $2.25 each once you tallied all that went into producing them. It’s been fun, not least because it looks so silly. Old chicken wire stuck to poles from a tent we no longer have, bound by an ancient blue polyester dress, make our gate. Someone gave us a wine-making tank and we took a piece of guttering that fell down and made a rain spout to fill it for watering. (Hauling 12 buckets a day will get you in shape fast, kids.)

And we drilled holes in the bottoms of about ninety-eleven-hundred plastic buckets leftover from kitty litter, which annoyed Jack no end. He didn’t mind drilling the holes to give the tomatoes we planted proper drainage. He just didn’t like validating my recurring theme that someday all those buckets we kept piling in the basement (some of which we MOVED with from our former bookstore home) would “come in handy someday.” When it turned out I was right, Jack knew there would be no stopping my future hoarding tendencies on household detritus.

He’s kinda right. We have milk jugs piled up so we can make self-watering drip containers, and an old gate salvaged from friends who said “you want this?” It’s leaning against one of the infamous walnut trees, waiting for its day. Gardeners may kinda by nature (no pun intended) be hoarders. Dunno; this is only our second year having fun with the inner and outer outside rooms of our home. Keep you posted. Meamwhile, we keep the inner room clean for visitors and stash all the stuff in the outer room, guarded by the chickens.