they were more concerned with their hair, their clothes, and boys. “We had lived, perhaps obliviously, through a period of incredible change,” Copeland reflects, and as high school ended, “we were about to go into eight different directions.” The young women went off to college and careers, adulthood and parenthood, marriages and divorces. They mostly lost touch with each Cleaning out her mother’s house leads former columnist Jennifer Howard to a deeper understanding of why we other until they came back toaccumulate stuff in “Clutter.” gether in 1994 and gradually re-established their friendmore than 500 cookbooks. And it fell to her ship, which continues to this day. daughter to clean it up. In looking back through the eventful deBut Howard delves well beyond her cades they lived though, Copeland notes that charge, examining the dangers of hoarding race was “part of our day-to-day reality, like and of “a culture that creates a craving for wallpaper.” Despite the challenges, though, things we don’t need.” She traces the roots “those eight Negro girls who started elemenof excess consumerism back to the Victoritary school together became eight successful ans and follows it through the age of mailAfrican American women,” she writes. “It’s order catalogues to big-box stores and onsimple. We are family. We are the Daughters line retailers. of the Dream.” She also addresses the industry that has Tamara Copeland is the former presigrown up around decluttering, interviewing dent of the Washington Regional Association professionals who help people pare down of Grantmakers, and also led Voices for Amertheir stuff and junk haulers who tote it away. ica’s Children, the National Health & EducaAnd she notes that accumulating stuff is not tion Consortium, and the Infant Mortality merely an individual or family problem, but is Initiative of Southern Governors’ Association having an increasing impact on the environand Southern Legislative Conference. https:// ment, “cluttering up the planet in ways that daughtersofthedream.org humans have not yet reckoned with.” Yet still we buy, discard, repeat. As HowDrowning in Stuff ard writes, cleaning out our parents’ housJennifer Howard was faced with a formidable es has now become a “generational rite of task. So she did what any reasonable person passage for contemporary Americans.” But would do. She tackled it “in bits and pieces,” thanks to her, we at least have some good comspending more than a year dealing not only pany as we fill the trash bags, someone who with mountains of debris, but also with “emohas rooted beneath the surface and is able to tional snares.” Then she wrote a book about it. eloquently express the burdensome mix of reIn “Clutter: An Untidy History,” Howard sentment, forgiveness, and catharsis that go describes the mess that confronted her when with the job. she walked into the house that her mother had Jennifer Howard is a former contributoccupied for more than 50 years. A hoarder ing editor and columnist for The Washington who “trailed chaos in her wake,” Howard’s Post, a former senior reporter for The Chronmother had accumulated “heaps and stacks icle of Higher Education, and a contributor to and boxes and bags” of stuff—from festering numerous publications, including the Times takeout containers and “glasses with brown Literary Supplement and Slate. www.jennifersludge at the bottom” to designer shoes and howard.com u
THE POETIC HILL
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by Karen Lyon
ancy Arbuthnot is a DC artist and writer who was formerly an English professor at the US Naval Academy and is now an occasional art and poetry workshop leader at CHAW and Calvary Women’s Services. She is looking forward to upcoming artist’s residencies at AnnMarie Gardens and Catoctin Mountain National Park. Her poem below is from her 2020 book, “Postcards from the Border: Poems and Watercolor Meditations,” and also appeared in an exhibit at the Capitol Hill Arts League.
city of my city of white monuments overheard on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial rising above the Potomac’s dark waters sometimes I just have to come here to take back my country remember our dreams
If you would like to have your poem considered for publication, please send it to klyon@literaryhillbookfest.org. (There is no remuneration.) u
May 2021 H 87
