Home Tending. Some people like to tend their gardens, some to mow their lawns. Others like to make curtains and paper their walls. I like to arrange things upon our tables, shelves, and chests. Upon the dining room buffet, I place smooth, sculpted rocks from Lake Michigan, calico patterned damask and white, a bumpy tortoise seashell lined in satin ribbon pink, and an urn shaped crystal vase jammed with wild flowers that I cut down the road. I place these and other objects on tables, mantles, and shelves, usually in groups of three. Three is good, two never enough, four cluttered. I think of them as still lives, ever changing still lives.   I arrange and rearrange.

When I grow tired of the monochromatic theme I had to have after Christmas’s colors – white pillar candles, white pottery, and white stones arranged carefully on the walnut chest – I change them. I turn on Bach or Chopin, sometimes even light candles or a fire and then I walk around our living rooms placing things, changing things. Arranging things reconnects me with my home, my idea of what home is – a place both stimulating and restful.

I take antique pewter bowls out of the wardrobe and sit them on the bookshelf. I stand a charcoal-colored terra cotta burial urn, marked with grasses of the African plains, on the Irish pine chest in front of the window. I lay velvet lime bracket fungi inside an ornate Victorian platter whose painted flowers match it. Sitting on the dining table the duff-smelling fungi will remind me of the Gunpowder woods and my hike there in early spring. I rearrange objects on the mantel — lean a carmine Native American basket against the wall behind an azure Emus egg, a mottled brown and white conch shell and a Waterford crystal decanter. It works.