I’ve been on a purge.
The itch began a while ago, a general sense that I’d accreted to much junk in the closets, too much paper in the drawers, too many cleaned and de-labeled empty jars in the hutch designated for an unknown future occupation sprouting plant cuttings or storing glass beads or (the highest calling of all) preserving some component of a complex recipe.
It’s not all pipe dreams. I made kimchi in December.
But mostly, I’ve been throwing out junk: A bag of milled flaxseeds that survived the move to Chicago but burst open along the way and have since sat exposed and moldering in the back corner of my sideboard; an old bathrobe I’ve used intermittently for twenty years despite never really liking it; the stacks of charity-grade Christmas cards sent to me gratis by the nonprofit I donated to after my grandparents died; old bras.
I joined a gym so I could sell the rowing machine that was taking up space behind my bedroom door that I wanted to fill with a new bookshelf. I’d had stacks of books migrating around my apartment since last March, when I had to abort an organization of my home library due to the lack of any reasonable place to put them. They spent three months on my dining room table, and then another six on top of the bookshelves in my living room. Now the drifting happens more casually, a stack of books from one shelf exchanged for a stack on another as each settles into place.
I redid my bathroom, replacing the vanity cursed by a dysfunctional trinity of hinged mirrors with a sleek arched medicine cabinet. I binned the cheap white shelving unit above the toilet that was practically falling off the wall, and hung a picture in its place. I bought a bamboo storage unit to stand next to the shower, and ever since I’ve entertained myself with its styling, adding a plant or vase of flowers, a candle, bottles of perfume. I painted the long wall a rich, saturated pink and everything else a gray named “black peppercorn.”
If it sounds like a lot, I’ve been taking it in stages. (Well, except for the bathroom, which dominated an extended weekend because these projects always do.) Mostly I find myself not really trying, just compulsively needing to take an hour break in the middle of a work day to clear out the desk in my entryway. I’ve been telling myself to take it slow, to do what I can, and not feel like I have to do it all at once. If I dump all the clothes I want to donate into a laundry hamper, that’s enough for one day. I don’t also have to launder them and then shlep them down three flights of stairs to the donation bin under the train tracks.
And the clearing out feels good, like the slight giddiness after a sneeze. And if it seems preemptive for a spring cleaning, I just tell myself that it isn’t cleaning, yet. It’s more like a beaver in winter, shuffling around, moving a log here or there. Beavers don’t hibernate, and neither do I. The winter makes me restless, but tidying calms me down.
And—bear with me—I feel like the general rustling up and dumping impulse is on theme for soup season. Soups, stews, chowders, bisques (et. al.) may be associated with cozying in on a chilly day, but perhaps primarily for the people who don’t make them. And as both a maker and enjoyer of soups [stews, chowders, bisques (et. al.)], nothing seasons a steaming bowl of turkey and white bean stew paired with crusty bread and finished off by a squeeze of lemon quite like the satisfaction of knowing you cleared out half your refrigerator to make it happen. The best soups my mom ever made were like this. I would ask her afterward about the recipe, and she’d just laugh and say she didn’t know, that she couldn’t repeat it if she tried. Part of the magic of soup is that it’s ephemeral—recipes optional. You’ll never truly be able to compare the soup you’re eating now with its predecessor.
A couple weeks ago, I printed out a half dozen New York Times soup recipes that had been sitting in my recipe inbox. Last week I made a creamy cauliflower soup with rosemary-infused olive oil. This week I’m making a recipe that is a riff on avgolemono. The focus on soups has meant I’m going through my store of homemade chicken bone broth faster than usual, so while compiling my grocery list for the coming week, I also threw a bunch of ingredients into a pot to make another round of stock: chicken backs, fennel trimmings, carrot tops, leftover rosemary and parsley from my refrigerator, a handful of shriveled carrots salvaged from my crisper drawer.
In the process, I organized my freezer. Ice and ice trays in the top left, pre-packaged frozen foods on the top right, frozen whole ingredients in the top middle, stock ingredients (chicken backs portioned into 1 lb. Ziplock bags, vegetable scraps) on the bottom right, and other meats taking up the rest of the bottom. Discovering a few spare chicken thighs from 2023 has prompted me to created an “inventory” note on my phone, because it would be such a tragedy to forget about the pair of lamb gyro sausages I bought from Paulina Meat Market last fall.
The next round of stock is bubbling away on the stove. My freezer is no longer a mystery box. Three flights below, I’m running a double load of laundry so that my old clothes are clean to donate. I’ve been moving in spurts all day, bustling and then lying down, starting a sequence of tasks and leaving them partly done, but nothing’s urgent. I feel happy-tired, in a warm, accomplished kind of way. I don’t know what I’ll do with the lamb gyro. I don’t need to know. That’s a question for another day.
Maybe I’ll make soup.
L. H. Lynch 