Stuff
Adobe Stock
Are you calling me a hoarder? I’m not a hoarder. Really, I’m not. Hoarders have winding pathways through a house piled high with 10-year-old unopened boxes of crap purchased off the shopping channels. My house isn’t like that! The books? Books don’t count. You can’t have too many books, even if you have to stack them on the floor. So, let’s not hear about the books again, OK?
Just call me a collector. Can you live with that? Call me a bringer-home of groovy stuff. I mean, could you pass up a 1925 Freeze-Ezzy ice cream maker? And if your mother died, would you just throw away the unraveling wicker Pancho Villa figurine she got in 1935 in Tijuana when she was just 10 years old? Come on! Let’s be real — you wouldn’t have the heart either. And I bet you couldn’t throw away the last baby-blue pair of tennis shoes she wore. The ones with the worn sides, the ones you spent so much time looking at as you walked her and her walker down the street saying, “Mom, don’t drag your feet, it ruins your shoes.” Just like she told you when you were five and she was walking you.
Yes, I am aware I just applied for Medicare and Social Security. I know I’m getting old, whatever that means. Obviously something different to me than to you. I guess you’re telling me my next rite of passage is signing up for hospice and it’s only a matter of time before you have to come clean out the mess of stuff I’ve collected? Is that what you are getting at? OK, OK I hear you, but I’m not a hoarder; there are no dead and decomposing rats on my shelves. Clean skulls and claws of roadkills do not count! My stuff is cool. Mostly.
That gold-painted pebble? That was given to me by some stoned hippie at a music festival? No, I don’t remember which music festival. No, I don’t remember the hippie either. And, I don’t remember who gave me that scarf you are calling a rag. Who do you think you are, anyway, going through my stuff, passing judgment on whether my T-shirts have too many holes? Of course I’ve gotten too round to wear the antique silk lingerie. I know that. But what are you going to do with it? Absolutely not! That was hand sewn by someone; you aren’t going to throw it away!
That’s the issue, isn’t it? You think I’m going to leave too much stuff for you to clean up! You kids don’t have the same sentimental attachment to stuff we Boomers do. Your furniture is utilitarian, your knicknacks nonexistent. You don’t feel duty-bound to hang on to useless family heirlooms just because they link you to your ancestors and your children are supposed to treasure them when you die. You younger folks live bare of sentiment. You keep your rooms sparse, your collection of stuff resides on Instagram.
I’ll get rid of that lingerie sometime before I die (maybe). I’ll do the right thing by you and pick away at my stuff, slowly. I’ll try my best to lessen the burden for when you come with your garbage bags and dump runs. But until then, I’m holding on to the things that make me sigh: the letter from an old lover, the cockatoo cup from a trip with my mother, the one plastic horse left over from my preteen collection. And if I bring home another hand-embroidered linen tablecloth and cram it, despite your objections, into the already full closet, it just proves I’m not dead yet.