East Flatbush Writer

My favorite movie of all time is The Sound Of Music starring Julie Andrews. It’s the story of a nun who is assigned to the Austrian Captain  Von Trapp, a widower and father of seven children. He runs a tight ship and requires Maria (Julie Andrews)  to use a whistle as the way to keep his “army of seven” in line. She refuses to manage his home in this militaristic fashion, and instead opens up a whole new world of laughter, dancing and song, focusing not on the looming world war 2, but rather a simple world of their favorite things. Some of her favorites, she serenades them include,

“Raindrops on roses, and whiskers on kittens,

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens,

Brown paper packages tied up with strings.”

How could those simple pleasures be a few of her favorite things?

We live in a society which encourages a taste for the sophisticated, expensive and immediately accessible. There is no waiting for or savoring of things. This blog is all about going back to a time when “the simpler the better,” less is more, you could buy it but why not make it, recycle and up-cycle.

I have been slowly recreating my attached, post-ww2, small home, located in the heart of Brooklyn, New York into a veritable homestead. Our friends think we are clinically insane when we recount the joys of making our own perfume and clothes detergent, crocheting all our scarves, and sometimes even selling our wares at flea markets in Union Square. We bake most of our desserts, cook 90 percent of our meals at home and said goodbye to cable for good two years ago.

So what’s life like? Its still a work in progress. We are still (some of us more than others) attempting to minimalize our belongings, our debt, our connection to technology and even our thought-life. It is not at all easy and sometimes even a bit unrealistic, but we are on a search for a less complicated time in our life where we truly “enjoy the simple things.”