The thing about stuff: living in a material world
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 06:29AM I have a lot of stuff.
I think it's hereditary. My whole family has a lot of stuff.
My paternal grandparents had two farm houses and numerous barns full of stuff. Every thing they ever bought or received lined the walls and covered the surfaces. My uncle took over the farm recently and is happily adding to the collection.
The maternal side had less and was tidier about it, but had stuff nonetheless. When we moved my maternal grandmother into her most recent home, she had two full drawers of torn pantyhose and over 20 styrofoam meat containers.
I used to think that my immediate family was better about having stuff. I was wrong. They just had different stuff.
My mother had scrapbooks filled with things she had gathered over the years. Comics, cards, sayings, articles. My father gathered books. We tease that we didn't need to go to the library to do history papers, we just went to Dad's library. That fact became less funny when Dad went to Ukraine and I got left with boxes and boxes of his books.
The rest of us aren't much better. None of my siblings have met a book we didn't like. It's a sacrilege in our family to get rid of books -- even for a good cause. Add to that children's toys, school keepsakes, knick knacks, and more, there is a ton of crap out there. I have my share.
What to do with it all is plaguing me.
I keep asking myself: Who is going to want all this when I die?
The answer for most people of what is going to happen to all their stuff is that their children will inherit it and keep it and cherish it. They believe that because they worked to get it, their descendants will care about it and thus justify it's existance.
When The Guy and I discovered we couldn't have children, I started thinking about the things I have spent my life accumulating. Suddenly, most of it became like an albatross hanging around my neck.
I am not quite at the point of having a garage sale, but I am questioning what's important after all.
Turns out, it's not what I thought.
Reader Comments (2)
You know, the potential of having children is making me think seriously about all the crap I own.
Between the year when we put Grandpa C in the home and the year after Grandma died, we spent more than a decade dealing with all of their stuff. They kept every bath mat since they moved into their house in the 1950s, in a big, weird stack in their basement! Improperly-cleaned mayonnaise jars full of buttons, which stank as soon as you opened the jars' lids! Boxes full of receipts, because Grandma was sure they'd be useful to a historian someday. (...they won't. I'm a historian, and so I can say this is authority.)
Seeing Grandma's attachment to stuff (learned in the same house as your Grandpa, of course) has really challenged my attachment to things. They all have the potential of becoming a burden to someone down the road.
(Not that I don't have trouble letting go of books, and fear that my next place won't have room for all five of my bookcases.)
Room for bookshelves is a necessity. All else is optional.