I find myself wanting fewer things, and yet, somewhat paradoxically, I have begun a shop that sells them. It is a contradiction I have thought about quite a lot while deciding what Moss & Maye should become, because I have no desire to fill other people’s homes simply because there is a space on a shelf or wall that could accommodate something; increasingly I would rather be surrounded by fewer things that I notice, use and care about than by an abundance that gradually becomes invisible.
Things have a remarkable way of gathering around us without our ever quite deciding that they should: books we meant to read, clothes kept because they might be useful one day, cables belonging to things we no longer own, objects put down temporarily and somehow still occupying the same place years later. Yet amongst all of this are certain things that seem to belong to an entirely different order: the old book with someone’s handwriting inside, the bowl our hand reaches for without thought, a picture that has travelled from house to house, a stone carried home from a river, something made by a child long ago that is worth almost nothing to anybody else and yet would be extraordinarily difficult to throw away.
Perhaps the difference is that, somewhere along the way, these things have stopped being merely objects. Memory has settled into them: the kitchen in which the bowl was used, the person whose handwriting crosses the page, the afternoon beside the river when the stone was picked up, the small hands that made the crooked thing we have carried carefully through the years. We sometimes speak rather dismissively of becoming attached to things, but perhaps attachment is exactly what has happened; threads have formed between an object and a person, a place or a period of our lives, until pulling the object away tugs at everything connected to it.
Keep only what is beautiful, useful, or deeply loved has gradually become a quiet thread running through Moss & Maye, although I don’t mean it as a rule, and certainly not as another instruction for emptying our homes until only perfectly chosen objects remain. Beauty itself becomes less straightforward when we pay attention to it, because the things that hold my gaze are often those in which time has become visible: tarnished silver, the softened corner of a book, an uneven mark left by the hand that made something, an old wooden frame carrying dents from rooms and lives I will never know. We call these signs of wear, as though everything that happened after an object was new were deterioration, but perhaps some marks are not evidence of damage at all; they are evidence of encounter.
Even usefulness can mean more than function. A notebook may be useful because it makes us want to write, a painting because our eyes rest upon it when we look up from work, a smooth stone because touching it returns us momentarily to a riverbank. Perhaps an object can be useful not only because of what it does, but because of what it helps us notice.
This is part of what draws me both to making things and to finding older things for Moss & Maye, because I find it almost impossible to pick up an old frame, an inkwell or some other survivor of an ordinary life without wondering who touched it before me, where it stood, and through what unlikely sequence of house moves, clearances, gifts, losses and discoveries it has arrived here when almost everything else belonging to that moment has disappeared. Usually I will never know, and I rather like that; perhaps attention does not always have to end in an answer.
And this is where the contradiction of Moss & Maye begins to make sense to me. I don’t want to put more things into the world merely for the sake of putting more things into it, or persuade somebody that an empty corner represents a problem waiting to be solved by a purchase. There is already enough noise encouraging us to want more, replace more quickly and begin again; I am much more interested in choosing slowly, keeping longer, noticing what has already survived, and making things with enough care that somebody might still want to live with them when the novelty of owning them has disappeared.
Some things at Moss & Maye will be made by me, some will begin with encounters with the living world, and others will have already lived a life before I find them. What connects them, I hope, is simply the possibility that someone might encounter one and feel something quite different from being persuaded to want it: the quiet recognition that I would like to live with this.
Because however possessively we speak of our things, perhaps we are often only their keepers for a while. A journal may gradually thicken with words and drawings, a picture may hang on a wall through years of changing circumstances, an old object may gather new marks amongst those it already carries, until one day somebody else picks it up and wonders about the person who owned it before.
So perhaps beautiful, useful, or deeply loved isn’t really about having less at all. It is about allowing what we choose to keep to become more visible, and remembering that the things around us quietly participate in our lives, gathering scratches and fingerprints, associations and memories, until some of them become something more than the objects they once were.
Perhaps the question is not whether something deserves a place in our homes, but whether this is something we would like to keep close enough, and long enough, for a story to gather around it.