Letter of Recommendation: Baskets

I’m stealing this title straight up from the New York Times’s excellent column. I’ve been into baskets since I went through my Victoria magazine period in late college/early grad school—when all my furniture was wicker and all my upholstery white (what a great idea with two dogs, a tendency to knock over mugs of tea, and a penchant for going barefoot and then putting my feet up….) I still have the sturdy woven cane laundry basket I bought then—and I think both casserole carriers from the same period. At some point I added a magazine basket and maybe one to collect dog toys.

But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered that the real utility of baskets wasn’t decoration, but rather carrying stuff (I know, news flash, but in my defense it’s not the 19th century anymore). I was forever trying to carry too much to or from my car and dropping things, or gathering peaches precariously in my shirttails. And then I moved into the house I live in now, where the previous owner had left behind—in addition to her incredible gardens and six chickens that were literally written into the counter-offer—a collection of capacious, sturdy cane gardening baskets. I took to them like a burr to my dog’s tail. I’ve used them to harvest fruit, cut flowers, and haul small bundles of weeds to the compost, not to mention schlep casseroles to friends’ houses and clothes on car-camping trips.

Recently, a bachelor neighbor of mine passed away, and his good friend and executor, Linda, put notes in all our boxes that we should come by for the estate sale. As it turns out, Mark was a big collector of baskets, so to the ones I had gathered, and Cynthia had left me, I now added a set of Mark’s bamboo drying trays, a nice wastebasket, and a beautiful little handled pine-needle basket that I think might be Paiute. I’ve been using the heck out of the drying trays as I got hammered with stone fruit this year and foraged a bunch of seaweed at the coast that needed to be put up before it spoiled.

Whenever I touch or pick up a basket like the drying tray, a particular feeling comes with it, something that wakes me up a bit and moves me just beyond the thing I’m doing to look back at it. The main impression I get when this happens is gratitude—for the skill involved in making the basket, for the lovely things it holds, and for the person who left it for me to carry on. To me, a basket is in woven, physical form what the word “care” means.