stuff

I'm not at all a minimalist when it comes to architecture, home, clutter..Though I hate mess, I will constantly cultivate meaningful clutter. I GROW things around myself, I form collections out of random objects that spoke to me at one point or another. Never mind the fact that I have kept every hand-written note/letter sent to me in last 25 years AND BROUGHT IT HERE -- years, miles, oceans later. The oldest is a postcard sent to me by dad deployed in Germany when I was 2, he drew and wrote on it with a glitter pen. His works now cover  my walls,  and I can no longer imagine living without -- he gave me back the city I so love and miss..I got a pink medal "born in Leningrad" with a typo on it..Got countless love letters, hate letters, travel itineraries and sketches..You will never see a glass clown or a  fake plant here, but I am a proud owner of multiple time capsules -- a dry branch I picked up on a long walk -- it inspired many paintings once..dry leaves and pine cones and piles of pebbles my daughter brought in over last 2-3 years..I own a photo collage made by an absolutely brilliant and troubled punk An'ka who ended up in some tragic mess in NY. I got shells and nuts and weird bean pods from some exotic bush in Jamaica, got a piece of marble that chipped of a stature in Champs-Elysee's and fell right to my feet. A also have a pocket guide to Paris from 1950 from a woman who died in a nursing home, deeply demented and non-verbal, and no one claimed her things..the photo of her in her 30s was inside. Have an old black-n-white shot of my mom, young, pretty, coy, with a "beehive", pouring a glass of wine to a guy at a party..and  another one of her fiercely  piercing a shoe with a rapier while standing on a chair ON A ROOF. I can go on and on...I am a hopeless pack rat and this clutter will one day become my crypt. I only hope my daughter will save a faded picture of her loopy mom with an Angela Davis Afro at a tender age of 16 or something equally disturbing..