This past few months, my wife and I have been working our way around the house cleaning out closets and reorganizing the vast amounts of “stuff’ that we’ve accumulated over the past forty plus years. To be honest, I’ve been tackling the smaller spaces first because, well, the basement was daunting. It’s looked something like Extreme Storage Wars since we moved here seventeen years ago, and only been getting progressively worse as we add “essential” bits of nothing. Stuff that you know you’ll never see again, don’t have room to display, but is just too great to give or throw away. (Our niece commented years ago that our house looked like “a Hallmark store”, so that gives you an idea.)
I come from a long line of hoarders, before it was a thing, and seeing that lineal descent can be scary. What is it that causes human beings to gather and cling to large quantities of stuff that we’ll never use again? We have the family mashed potato bowl (apparently mashed potatoes were a feature at past dinners, because there was a fancy covered dish set aside just for them) , and Aunt Rozella’s silver. We have Cousin Miriam’s tea service. Royal Doulton, no less, but lacking hand-painted periwinkles. That’s ok, because we can display these attractively in the dining room or use it for holiday dinners. But what about the soup tureen I found – believe it was my mother’s – that is large, and we’ll most likely never use unless we have a dinner with footmen standing along the wall? Or a set of wine glasses that aren’t unattractive that came from a relative – another clean-out. I already use two sets of wine glasses – it’s as much as I can drink by myself – and have several more sets in the basement somewhere buried under piles of treasures. We build vast collections of china we’ll never use, books we’ll never read (or have read and can’t give away), hats and mittens that have grown dusty and smelly waiting patiently for us resurrect them. That’s the interesting part. Most of our stuff comes from other people’s cleaning projects, yard sales, and general giveaways. I have now put forth strict rules with my in-laws. We’re a favorite target of their “reorganizations”, because my wife responds with “oh, we’ll look at it”. Once some objet d’art crosses the threshold, it’s here forever. Let’s put it in the basement for now. From now on, nothing comes into this house from them unless an equal amount by volume goes back out.
One of my wife’s favorites to save in the past was holiday gift boxes. Again, a cultural and perhaps genetic disposition. Every Christmas of her youth, she’d hear “save the boxes and the bows” from her mother. We had hundreds that landed down in the basement every year, where they took on a nice aged musty scent. We kept them but couldn’t use them. Finally cleaned them out, but I wasn’t sure whether they should go to recycling or a toxic waste facility. Perhaps I’ve saved a few acres of trees somewhere. I remember my mother also saving boxes. She was despairing when they sold the house we grew up in and moved to an apartment. The gift box collection couldn’t go along. Actually, no. If I’m more accurate, less despair and more anger. She snarled at us through clenched teeth as the boxes came down from the attic and out to the dumpster. At a family funeral recently, I was saying to an elderly relative that I would come visit her some time. My sister later cautioned that “I don’t think you want to go into her house.” She’s losing her sight, and housekeeping wasn’t really a strength of hers anyway, so I can only image what the house, which she’s lived in for at least seventy of her ninety years, looks like now. It’s the sort of rough material that Chip and Joanna Gaines dream of at night. My father had a couple of elderly relatives – cousins of my grandmother’s, for whom he managed much of their affairs. They had two homes and you couldn’t really get into either of them – there were just narrow paths to a couple of chairs. When they eventually went into a nursing home, one house – their winter residence – took six fillings of a thirty-foot dumpster to clear away. Apparently it was a big hit at the local dump with the locals lining up to get a shot when it arrived for each unloading. Must have been like the mother of all yard sales. The other house, the old family home, took a two-day auction to clean out and a crew working days after that to finish. There was a large grand piano in the “parlor” that we never knew was there. So much stuff – old magazines and newspapers going back decades, old clothes, that a grand piano goes missing? As children, my father would take us to visit another elderly relative, who would meet us on the front porch and we’d sit in folding chairs. I peeked into the house one day, and remember assorted crap as far as the eye could see.
My wife’s father too was a saver. Alfred’s basement, also his workshop where he made many beautiful wooden furniture and objects, had piles of wood scraps, tools, and a vast assorted collection of crap. A neighbor once said his garage at the lake cottage (which was his “summer” workshop) was like going to a rather dusty Home Depot. It seems that anyone having lived through the Great Depression never threw anything away. Now, that’s just become a part of our culture. When Alfred’s 1960’s era television died – one of those big console televisions you see on vintage tv shows, he stripped out the guts and made it into a stand for the new flatscreen tv. It looked a big incongruous, but in his mind, that perfectly good cabinet didn’t go to waste.
So what compels us to save stuff? Squirrels and birds don’t save nests? “See that nest up there in the oak tree? That twig sticking out was your great grandmother’s, and I used to feed you from it.” They may collect some shiny objects, but it’s temporary. You almost never see a chipmunk or a woodchuck carrying a small suitcase when on the move. No, they just let it go and choose a new branch or dig a new hole next year. Bears may reuse a den for a few years, but they too move on. Even beavers, who spend months building dams and lodges, know enough to travel light when the food supply is too far away. Moving day at the beaver lodge doesn’t seem to be a big deal – no large vehicles backed up to the water’s edge, no packing crates or boxes. They just walk away and start over. Humans can’t do that. We have too much invested in collecting. We assume that what we have collected will increase in value. “Someday, that’s going to be worth a lot of money.” I used to hear that from the two elderly cousins. In fact, that was their mantra. Well, one of them, anyway. The other ran and hid when anyone came to the door. Did I mention they were slightly bat…. crazy eccentric? Old newspapers aren’t typically considered a goldmine. OK, one with headlines of the Titanic sinking might be, but most of 1953 and 1954 was not noteworthy. Let’s not stuff those into a safe deposit box and wait for Sotheby’s to call. I’ve wondered about those folks on “Antiques Roadshow” whose stuff is worth tens of thousands of dollars. They seem to be a small percentage, while behind them on the show we see long lines of folks like me walking steadily and patiently toward disappointment. Family heirlooms they thought would allow them to buy Amazon stock or Windsor Castle turn out to be worth twenty bucks on a good day. Don’t bother calling the insurance agent and putting a rider on that tea set, bureau, or painting just yet. Apparently Grandma’s cookbook collection isn’t the nest egg we’d thought.
So, as I said, we’ve been working our way through the house, downgrading the closets from “Oh, Dear God” to “Not That Bad”, and in a couple of cases, “We can actually find things”. In the last two months I’ve been working in the basement. There’s motivation here. Our daughter is moving from DC to Boston this summer, and in the process has accumulated her own “stuff”. Judging by the boxes, she’s acquired a significant portion of the Library of Congress and some bits and pieces that Dolly Madison dropped on her way out of town. Some of it is going into our basement – where it will fit right in beside the stuff from her childhood that never left. Fully half of what’s down there is hers. So basically I’m clearing out our clutter to make room for more of hers. Our children utter those fateful words, “don’t throw anything of mine out until I get home and see it.” I know, right? I’m deeply appreciating that tv commercial where people point to piles of junk and it disappears. Can anyone teach me that spell? Our children are supposed to move out and take their stuff with them. That’s the Circle of Life, isn’t it? Until they’re back.
I'm Thinking...No! 