Live with Love

What roles do the things we own have in our lives? What makes some special and others mundane?

For some of us, it could be the functionality of the special object, a tool that perhaps makes our lives simpler and is used over and over until it bears the imprint of our hands.

For the visually sensitive, an object might gain favor for its esthetic appeal, the smooth curve of a bowl or the sinuous shape of a work of art.

Perhaps the object has been passed down through generations, carrying the comfort of the accustomed, a sense of familial identity.

But in all instances, it can be argued, objects we cherish carry with them a sense of our identity.
For Mary Randolph Carter the stuff we collect represents far more than the flotsam and jetsam of our lives. For her, the things she has collected, as much as the things that she grew up with, have significance beyond mere ownership. These are the things that she loves and that bring meaning to her life.

“As a child, I lived through two fires in which we lost family members and possessions,” she said. “People say to me, after that, why not live in a cinderblock house with five pieces of furniture but I have to live with things that bring meaning to my life.”

In the forward to her book, she writes that she recently rewatched Nomandland, the 2020 drama about a woman who embarked on a late-life journey in an old van packed with only a few essentials. She briefly contemplated doing the same thing, giving up all her possessions.

Her friends would laugh at such a vision, she said, because she is known to be a “collector/junker” and the thought of her giving up her voluminous collections “would be astounding and anathema to who I am and how I have lived.”

She concludes that, “What makes life astounding … is not what the things we’ve collected and lived with but the people and memories we associate with them. We cling to those things that connect us to those people … They are the things we want to live with because they give character, meaning, warmth and a personal kind of beauty to the place we call Home.”

It is an esthetic woven into the fabric of her life and shared with others around her. Carter, a triple threat as an author, photographer and collector. She is the creative director for Ralph Lauren with whom she has worked for 37 years.

She said she and Lauren shared a passion for stuff. When she first visited his office in 1988, she noticed his desk was filled with items and she immediately felt at home. “I asked him to write the foreword to my book American Family Style, and he did. He later said he’d joined my world and wanted me to join his. We have the same aesthetic, so it was a perfect fit.”

That first book was far from the last. Carter has since written ten books in her “junk series,” and recently published her latest volume, Live with the Things You Love … and you live happily.”

“Originally, I was going to call it You Can’t Take It with You,” she said with a laugh, “but my publisher thought that was a little dark. Instead, I spun it differently, with a focus on things that are really loved and that you can’t do without. These are the things you have to have—I have to have that little statue of George Washington that always sat on my father’s desk. It’s about filling a house with things that tell stories that are meaningful.”

She brackets the book with chapters about her own two homes—one an apartment in New York and the other the home she and her husband, Howard Berg, have owned in Millerton since 1988. “We’ve lived in our apartment for five decades so it’s a scrapbook of living,” she said. “When we bought the house in Millerton, I thought I would clean up my act and take all my stuff to the country. It just hasn’t worked out that way.”

Instead, both residences are filled with significant items that bring her joy.

In between those two personal chapters, she sandwiches 11 chapters with accounts of other homes filled with carefully curated “stuff.”

“Most of the people who shared their stories, and their homes, are friends” she said. “Everyone has a personal connection or was recommended by friends. I don’t look for celebrities; I look for people who share my point of view about living and what our homes should provide for us.”

The book’s publication was delayed by the pandemic because she and her son, photographer Carter Berg, could not go into the homes. When the ban on personal interactions was lifted, she started with a chapter on her old friend Joan Osofsky, lifestyle expert and owner of Pine Plains’ Hammertown Barn. Osofsky has struck a balance, deciding what would go forward with her as she changed homes. When she eventually downsized after her children were grown and she divorced, she said she did not want to feel claustrophobic with all her possessions in her new home.

“Moving into a smaller house I wanted to have some order,” she said, but admits “all the bits and pieces make the memories.”

It was Osofsky who recommended her friends, Sharon and Paul Mrozinski for yet another chapter. The Mrozinskis, who followed peripatetic personal lives and careers before committing to a new path in 2006, have found their heaven in Vinalhaven, an hour’s ferry ride off the coast of Maine. There they operate a shop that is also their home.

Sharon reveals that coming from a much larger property and business in Wiscassett, Maine, they moved their favorite things but had to decide which would make the cut. Paul, an architect, was guided by which would fit. “Scale is always the things,” Paul, an architect, advises.

“I loved their story and the way they combine things,” said Carter. She said it was a “real adventure” for her and her son to get to the island and photograph their home.

Scale is all important in the story of another friend as well—this time that of art director Paula Grief, who, after her daughter was grown and she had parted from her husband, decided that she was going to open a ceramics gallery and live over it. That inspiration led to the purchase of a 10-foot-wide, three-story high storefront in Hudson, NY.

She has her gallery and studio on the ground floor and a compact living area above. While living in a somewhat spartan, utilitarian way, she admits to having two storage units of things she couldn’t part with. She envisions a larger property that would become a “family home,” filled with the items in the storage shed but at the same time cannot envision giving up her gallery/home “filled with so many things I can’t live without.”

“The challenge was that because I was writing about friends, I wanted to make sure I was telling their stories in the most beautiful way,” Carter said. And, indeed, she has. The handsome book she has produced encapsulates their life trajectories and the imaginative and artistic ways they have incorporated valued possessions into their homes.

“When we photographed their homes, we would do an overview and then focus on a brass candlestick, a comfortable chair, bookshelves or a piece of art,” Carter said. “I try to tell people to choose quality, to choose things they can live with for a long time. The Bible says, ‘Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’ At the core, try to live with things that have meaning, and, hopefully, you will live happily ever after.”

Carter will present a program Thursday, March 27, at 6:30PM at The White Hart Inn in Salisbury, sponsored by Oblong Books and the Scoville Memorial Library. “I think I’ll bring my friends and ask each to bring something from the book that they can’t live without,” Carter said. “I may bring the old, vintage elephant toy that appears on the cover of the book. I bought her in Hudson NY at the Red Chair. She’s French, so I named her Bardot. People say have you ever found something that is really valuable but I think we should just live with the things we love.”

Tickets for the event are $15 and include a complimentary glass of house wine, beer or non-alcoholic beverage plus a $5 voucher towards the purchase of Live with the Things You Love.