Stuff Matters

For many of Earth’s inhabitants, moving day is a fairly straightforward matter. Possessions are few. What’s taken along, and usually by the simplest means, is small in size though big in importance.

And then there’s us.

While not exactly an upper case Moving Day, it came close enough – that day last fall when, in advance of a major renovation of our island house, Bob and I packed up our furniture and boxed many of our possessions to move them into storage. Eight years’ worth of stuff. Actually, more.

For years, while still renting various summer cottages, we made numerous trips to the basement of our Illinois house, hauling down furniture, old mirrors, quilts, lamps, boxes of objects labeled “Save for Maine.” When at last we bought our own place, we pulled into the driveway that first summer with a rented truck. The following year we down-sized to a rented van. Since, my car on its annual cross country trips is densely packed.

I arrive with updated photo albums, kitchen gadgets, bottles and jars of foodstuffs not readily available on the island. And, of course, books. Boxes of them. I carry in cartons and files, framed prints, various finds and purchases of utilitarian and emotional import that in the intervening months I’d become convinced were needed – one more platter, another tray, as if my intention is to serve the entire island population in a single sitting.   

Home is a “place where every day is multiplied by all the days before it,” claimed the late Freya Stark. It’s also a place layered with our possessions – the objects, fragments, pieces of our lives, the beautiful and the ordinary, the potential for, were this ancient Rome, an archeological dig.

Obviously, all our possessions don’t possess value or meaning. And let’s be clear, I’m not talking coffee makers and blenders here, all the mere, mundane and way-more-than-we-need commodities too soon outdated, unwanted and, as testified by brimming curbside bins and landfills, discarded (albeit by the more rigorous cabinet-and-closet cullers among us). I mean objects which can, for example, exert powerful and potentially positive influence. Like how, on the eve of his surgery, our 12-year old grandson, defying the stigma linking adolescent boys to stuffed toys, carried to the hospital his resurrected-from-the-back-of-the-closet “Lambie.”

Doesn't our desire to possess and collect seem instinctive, part of our human nature? Watch how a toddler herds his Cheerios into the corner of his highchair’s tray, a small collection that in just a few years may well balloon into hoards of Hot Wheels or, thanks to the marketing departments of Disney and Pixar, myriad must-have action figurines. Maybe then rocks, shells, stamps. And later, possibly, in a glass vitrine, autographed baseballs.

Naturally, this may lead to excess – a point made particularly apparent when attempting to clear out basement or attic. But hey, we might argue, consumerism and consumption is the stuff on which the American economic engines thrive, no? But why then, I’ve often wondered, leafing through those so-called “shelter magazines,” do houses appear clutter-free, even as they’re glossily depicted in pages brimming with ads urging readers to buy more and more? Maybe such tidy houses don’t so much speak to buying less as to spending more on clever ways to store all our stuff out of sight. I’m reminded of the summer an island friend hosted a party for visiting author and social activist Studs Terkel. A young man by way of introduction said he was an organizer. Not surprisingly, Terkel immediately launched into a lively conversation with what he’d taken as a labor organizer only to discover the objects of the young man’s organizing skills were closets.

Yes, the bond to our possessions – okay, some possessions – can be important. While personalizing the spaces in which we live, certain objects also imbue them with important emotional and psychological texture. They may reflect what matters to us most. True, much of what I carried into and then boxed to carry out of my house last fall isn’t, admittedly, important or necessary. But I’ve come to believe that more of it than I’d originally thought is.

Matter matters. The squat pitcher holding coneflowers plucked from my garden may not have belonged to my deceased mother but in it her spirit and her love of gardening emerges. Her cracked but cherished Blue Willow-patterned platter does not make my house hers. But as an object that carries the vibrancy of her attention and care, it transports some of her presence here. It instructs, “Remember.”

Recently I came across the term wabi sabi, what in Japanese is the “perfect imperfection.” You know, what in certain objects bear evidence of their making or, reflecting time’s passage, are made more beautiful with use. That “never the same” quality certain old things possess.

Our dining room table is more beautiful to me because its wide-planked top bears the phantom traces of three long-gone hinges and latch, evidence that in its former life as a 19th century door it was banged shut who knows where or by how many hands. I raise the yellow-and-green-painted lid of a funky, scavenged sewing stand and my fingers rest in the same spot worn smooth by women I will never know, whose stories I can't tell. An island friend who splits cords of firewood with an expert precision I’ll never possess, uses an axe that belonged to his grandfather, a man I never met though the axe’s gouged and weathered handle tells me where for three generations it was held, where it held up. Surely when Pablo Neruda exhorted fellow poets to look closely at the world of objects worn with the hand, to note in them “the abiding presence of the human,” he meant, for example, my friend's axe as well as my mother’s filigreed sewing scissors with their scarred and dented blades.

Originally, I came to our island house dedicated to the belief that this would be a time to cull, pare back, streamline. Even as we emptied a part of our Illinois basement into the rented truck we drove east, I maintained, if not a truly Thoreauvian commitment to “simplify, simplify, simplify,” at least the good intention that each object transported was or would be transformed into the necessary. I was certain that on the island, with a Robinson Crusoe-like independence, I’d have less stuff. I’d enjoy a freedom almost guaranteed by a smaller house of fewer closets, a concrete cellar rather than a finished basement. Even as I unloaded the rented truck, dreams of Henry Beston in his rustic Outer Beach dune shack played in my head. As if each packed box I carried in was somehow linked to a deeper involvement with the natural world. As if each equated to longer hours of contemplation on an empty beach. Here, I reminded myself in multiple trips between truck and house, I’d be somehow different, unencumbered. Each June, I’d return to a freer, cleansed version of myself, as though I were making a yearly pilgrimage to one of those rigorous health spas that demand fasting and a de-toxifying purge.

Last fall, with numerous boxes stacked before me, I was forced to look around and wonder, Did anything change here? Did I truly – naively? – think that with empty closets and less furniture, I’d achieve some nostalgic reach back to the past when life was – wasn’t it? – simpler? Maybe it’s easier to live a rustic life from afar. The way that on vacation we think we’ll get away from it all only to find our busy minds packed their bags and came along, too.

Years after making my pledge to do with less, I discover mine is a house increasingly weighted with stuff, stratified layers of the meaningful and necessary, but so, too, the redundant, the not needed. What elsewhere didn’t fit, what I couldn’t bear to part with. The attractive and quirky. The valuable or what one day might be. All the myriad trigger points for memory and reconstructed history. And maybe that’s as it should be, no? When living in a place where you claim you feel most at home, isn’t it natural to haul there not just things but your propensity to collect, to honor, and even sometimes to (gulp) hoard?

No doubt when all those packed boxes are returned to me in spring, there’ll be occasions when I ask myself: Why on earth did I save this? In the days that follow, I’ll surely look aghast again at cellar or garage (ever notice that the only easily-bridged distance between garage and garbage seems to be the letter “b” that distinguishes them?) Yes, there’ll be times I purge and pitch, pass down, give away, recycle. I’ll donate to the Island Community Center “General Store” and the Take It or Leave Shed at the island dump or, as it’s officially known – and so perfectly euphemistic when someone’s throw-aways become someone else’s treasure, when someone’s garbage becomes someone else’s problem – the transfer station.

When, like a writer tackling a revision by understanding what to elide, I'll rediscover that with discard we better see what we have.