Simple act of puttering cleans home and soul

In “Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy,” the 1990s best-selling guide to simple living and domestic tranquility, author Sara Ban Breathnach devotes a day — May 20 to be exact — to “The Art of Puttering.”

She describes the simple acts of puttering — rearranging the furniture, polishing the silver, washing the china and crystal, even putting a bouquet of fresh flowers in a vase — as “homecaring.”

“Puttering is the intersection of introspection and inspiration,” Ban Breathnach writes. “It’s not on our to-do list, therefore it charms, centers, and cajoles stressed spirits.”

I like the definition in my suitcase-sized 1937 Webster’s Twentieth-Century Dictionary. According to Webster, one who putters is “One who puts or places.”

Like most women, I barely have time to keep my house in order. With a busy family and a houseful of pets, nothing stays tidy for long. Add to that my habit of collecting odds and ends, little treasures I fall in love with and have to bring home with me, and I tend to leave clutter in my wake whenever I pass through a room.

Housecleaning, a job that I think should be shared by every person living in the house, is a necessary chore and we’re all happier when it’s done. But puttering, like savoring the last truffle in the box, is a quiet and solitary pleasure.

I putter when I have serious things to think about, complex issues to work out, or decisions that need to be made. There is a connection between the act of re-doing the rooms around us and re-doing the space in our minds.

But puttering around the house is also a way to celebrate a moment free of deadlines and commitments. When I claim an hour or two to enjoy being home alone, it doesn’t matter if I take on a small thing like rearranging pictures on the wall, or a project as heavy-duty as moving every stick of furniture to make room for some great new find. What I’m really doing is nesting. I’m celebrating the home I’ve made out of my house, and all of the things I love in that house.

Puttering isn’t work. It’s a pleasure. It comforts the soul and settles the mind.

Of course, a practical benefit of puttering around the house is that it helps you edit, or take away, the unnecessary clutter. That’s especially important to collectors and others who have a tendency to gather new possessions.

When you move things around in a room, there are usually leftovers that don’t fit into the new arrangement. The leftovers are odds and ends that have migrated around the house and are out of place, or old items that just don’t work in your new space. Cleaning house takes care of wandering possessions, and puttering identifies the misfits.

I have a friend who keeps a box in her garage. Whenever she stirs things around in a room in her house or something loses its place in her heart, she puts it in the box. The first charity to call for discards gets whatever is in the box. As soon as the truck pulls away, the empty box goes back into the garage. She is constantly evaluating, editing, discarding and donating the clutter around her. Knowing that each item will go through this process discourages her from buying things on impulse. When she spots a bargain, before she ever takes out her checkbook or credit card, she thinks about “the box.”

Alexandra Stoddard, a noted interior designer and author of “Creating a Beautiful Home,” is another proponent of what she calls “creative puttering.” Stoddard believes that puttering is more than the simple act of clearing a room of its clutter. “It helps us to become aware of what’s still important to us, what continues to have meaning,” she writes.

You may not use the word puttering — little girls call it “playing house” and grown men call it “spending time out in the shop or the garage” — but the act is the same. It’s the leisurely art of putting your hands on your favorite things and finding or keeping a place for them in your home and your life.

Resources

• “Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy” by Sara Ban Breathnach (1995, Warner Books, $21).

• “A Room of Her Own: Women’s Personal Spaces” by Chris Casson Madden (1997, Random House Books, $32.50).

• “Creating a Beautiful Home” by Alexandra Stoddard (1992, William Morrow, $25).