Tag Archives: St. Thomas USVI

January 8, 2022 · 9:34 pm

A Life Seen in Patterns

Photo by Frank James

By Kimberly Mayer

This is how it happens. Day after day, a boy steps out back to pound nails. After a while he decides he’s pretty good at it. The boy grows up to be a carpenter. A young girl hears again and again, “Go to your room, young lady!” and there she hones certain skills. For me it was making mazes. All I needed was a pad of graph paper, pencils with good erasures, and the sanctuary of my room. There, I was free to lose myself–and find myself–in the mazes of my own making. 

In some inexplicable way they meant everything to me.

Like Anna Shechtman who started constructing puzzles at fourteen in “Escaping into the Crossword Puzzle” (The New Yorker 12.20.21), “I retreated into the grid.” Here we found our solace. “A grid has a matter-of-fact magic, as mundane as it is marvelous,” she explains. “From sidewalks to spreadsheets to after-hours skyscrapers projecting geometric light against a night sky, the grid creates both order and expanse.” Anna moved letters onto the page, while for me the squares became paths of entrapment and escape. 

In time Anna became assistant to Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times.  For me, maze making led to the drawing of floor plans and interior design—for aren’t they both about how we move through space? That was the sequence for me, and mazes were my portal. 

I have also lived on a fair share of islands: 

  • St. Thomas, USVI,
  • Manhatten, 
  • Mercer Island, WA 
  • San Juan Island, WA.
  • And this winter, Coronado Island, CA.

At some point, it seems, islands and waterways became the grid.

Will Shortz believes people have a natural desire to fill empty spaces. I see the empty spaces as paths. Both order and expanse, entrapment and escape. And how we move through space.

The way land breaks up and becomes inlets and seas and islands, one after the other, 

like jigsaw pieces when the box is first emptied and all the pieces turned over. 

For what are islands but broken land?

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September 15, 2015 · 5:52 pm

The Virtues of Being a Basketcase

Alaska room pic

By KIMBERLY MAYER

 

Two books are before me on my writing table: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo and Mess, by Barry Yourgrau. Two drastically different books on decluttering—one, so Zen, and the other, well, messy. I have browsed, pondered, read reviews on each, but haven’t dove into either yet. Instead I seem to be writing my own: a case for baskets.

A long time ago in what seems like another life, I lived on St. Thomas USVI and my passion for baskets started there, at The Shipwreck Shop in Charlotte Amalie. Moving from one rental to another, I furnished my homes with straw rugs and tropical trees standing about in baskets, dined on mahogany plates from down island, and donned straw hats as protection from the Caribbean sun. I practically lived out of The Shipwreck Shop and the look has been with me ever since, even now, on San Juan Island in the Puget Sound.

Baskets, I have found, pretty much work with any type of décor. Lately, what I like is juxtaposing baskets with the industrial. A winning combination: rustic and industrial.

In my house what goes into baskets is extensive: scarves and gloves on an upper shelf in the mud room–called an “Alaska room” in the Pacific Northwest. Hats in a wall-hung basket. Two large baskets contain gifts ready for giving when the occasions roll around. I store stationery,  greeting cards, and candles in baskets. Folded dining linens in baskets. In bathrooms, extra hand towels are rolled into a wire basket, and a collection of European soaps in another.

The list goes on and on, and with that I need to confess to a few little hoarding habits of my own. Nothing compared to Mr. Yourgrau’s stuff, but still… I “collect,” as I like to call it, “affordable luxuries,” all of which are stored in baskets. Oh, and in the process I collect baskets.

“Finders need keepers,” states House Beautiful’s Sensational Storage Solutions. Marie Kondo, the Japanese cleaning consultant and author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, would disagree. “A booby trap lies within the term ‘storage,'” she writes. Purging of belongings is Ms. Kondo’s modus operandi.

Mr. Yourgrau, on the other hand, author of Mess, accumulated everything of meaning, and if it didn’t have any, he gave it meaning. What began with gathering mementos such as cocktail napkins and coasters from well-loved restaurant experiences around the world, degenerated into hoarding plastic bags and cardboard boxes in his apartment in Queens.

“I looked like a storage help center,” he said on interview with NPR. “I thought they’d be useful when I eventually sort of tidied up my place.”

It can be a slippery slope. I confess to keeping packing peanuts for reuse as well as folded sheets of bubble packing plastic for the shipping of gifts. I keep them in baskets of course, out in the garage. Mr. Yourgrau lives in NYC and doesn’t have a garage. I don’t know what I’d do there; I would have to change my ways.

And seriously, Ms. Kondo, would you send me out for supplies each time I had to ship a gift? Perhaps your family lives within walking distance in Tokyo, but my family is all over the map.

Although Mr. Yourgrau has tidied up his place tremendously, his display of miscellany from table to table as seen in “A Hoarder’s Tale of Redemption,” The New York Times August 19, looks to me like Ye Olde Curiousity Shop down on Pier 54 in Seattle.

What started on an island for me, a passion for baskets, finds itself on an island once again. All my favorite things, close at hand yet out of sight. Call me a basketcase, but it’s working.

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July 1, 2015 · 8:07 pm

Rhoda and I

Give me an open shelf and I immediately go into display mode. From the pragmatic to the aesthetic–whether we’re talking everyday dishes or a collection of shells–in my mind they occupy the same sacred space. A well-arranged shelf is like music to me. Where did this come from?

Ah yes, Rhoda.

Not since The Mouseketeers had I been so enamored with a television show. From 1974 to 1978, for the life of the show, I didn’t sit there with my ears on but I was hooked. Rhoda was at first a backstory of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and later a spin-off. She had all the right ingredients and captured my imagination in a way that Mary hadn’t. Unlike Mary, Rhoda wasn’t perfect. She had issues. She had verve. And Rhoda was a window dresser. Having moved from Minneapolis back to NYC at the start of her own show, Rhoda called out, “New York, this is your last chance.”

I was working as Communications Editor for G. Fox & Co., a large department store at the time in Hartford, Connecticut. My first gig out of college, editor of in-house publications. Unlike Mary, who was tied to her desk, I had the freedom to roam between departments with paper & pen and camera, attending events, getting stories, and becoming acquainted with both employees and management. And in all the world of G. Fox & Co., I considered the Visual Merchandising team the most creative bunch—far more creative than my department, or even advertising.

Inspired by my new arty friends, the window dressers, I rented a trendy loft space in a beautiful old building enjoying a renaissance at the time near Union Station in Hartford—an area undergoing a major effort in urban renewal. My high- ceilinged, light-flooded space was a blank canvas for all that I would do. A massive store window, if you will. I think I got as far as rolling in a wooden spool for a table, my first piece of furniture ever, to start my life around.

Rhoda married Joe. Then love bumped me off course too, and the next thing I knew I quit my job, left Hartford, lost my security deposit and first month’s rent on that loft, left my first piece of furniture behind, flew to St. Thomas USVI for a couple of years, and… we won’t go into it.

Let’s just say I should have stayed, kept writing, and set my stage. Two things that make me immeasurably happy.

Rhoda’s marriage to Joe fell apart too. The ratings plunged. Joe was the owner of a wrecking company, and my ex-husband might as well have been too. In any case we pulled ourselves up through design, Rhoda and I.

“What is design but the creation of orderliness?” states Mary Douglas Drysdale.

Today my blue & whites are in a hutch. Like things together, that seems to work.

Bookcase 3

A major bookcase is color- blocked like a Mondrian painting. When I’m watching a game and my attention wanders, it is most likely up to the books.

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In the master bath, a shell collection sits on pine shelves that once held Costco-sized spices, sea salt, pepper mill, olive oil and vinegars in a kitchen in Pennsylvania.

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In the kitchen today, much of what was once hidden in upper cabinets is now out. Stainless steel kitchen shelves hold all our white every day china and clear glasses. The idea is that what is used frequently, doesn’t get dusty. And as cooks in prepping we experience extraordinary head and shoulder space.

Live with what you use and what you love. And get rid of the rest.

Yep, I can see Rhoda winking at that.

 

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