Stuff

                Stuff.

                The mundane detritus of our lives, accumulated rapidly, barely noticed, until we have to move.

                My family has a lot of stuff.  I can’t really point a finger at any one member and accuse them of hoarding more stuff than the others.  Whatever psychological malady that causes us to hold onto clothes that don’t fit, books we read years ago and didn’t even like, or the pay stub from a job in 1995 (on the off chance we may get audited), we all possess it.

                I’ve always admired people who have bare houses where nothing is visible.  Where do they put all their stuff?  They don’t seem to have any.  Their closets are neat and sparse.  Their kitchen are meticulous, utilitarian monuments, not overflowing with all the gifts my mother got from her wedding shower in 1967 along with every other household item purchased since. 

                Yesterday, I was going through the kitchen and counted three, count them, three cheese graters.  All shoved into the corner next to the stove where such items tend to congregate.  And yet if you’d asked me if we owned a cheese grater, I’ve had told you no. Had I decided to make a recipe that required grating cheese, I may even have gone out and bought a fourth cheese grater, tossing it into the pile with all the rest.

                Oh yes.  This stuff is the story of our lives.

                I own three mini food processors.  One I bought at the A&P back in 2009 when I joined Weight Watchers and decided to eat right.  It joined an older one that I was unaware we had.  Then I bought a third from the Pampered Chef a few years ago, but this one can be operated by hand.

                Last night, my sister and I were going through the bins of stuff my mother had salvaged from her patient’s apartment.  Like we didn’t have enough stuff, after her patient died she packed up everything and dragged it home, literally dying herself when the task was complete.  In those bins was a brand new mini food processor.

                “Oh, I’ll take that,” I said eagerly.

                My sister wrinkled her nose.  “Don’t you already have one?  Why do you need another one?”

                “I do already have one (three) but the pieces are always getting lost and I end up having to scour the entire kitchen every time I need to use it.”  (This is true.  But, what makes me think this won’t happen with the new food processor?  I have three and already experience difficultly finding enough pieces to make into one).

                We’re not moving out of the house.  My sister and I are switching. I’m moving into the separate basement apartment (my cats are not going to like this) and she’s moving upstairs because her boyfriend’s brother and sister are moving in to help out with bills.  This is not a major move and it shouldn’t be too bad.  Only it is, because we have too much goddamn stuff.  We aren’t hoarders, but probably shouldn’t throw stones at people who are.

                Growing up, we never had a lot of stuff.  Clothes were at a premium, often swapped to supplement meager wardrobes.  Consider yourself lucky if you could eke out five separate outfits for school without repeating. (And when you did repeat someone would always point out, with scorn, that you just wore that outfit on Monday.  Seriously.  To this day, I’m paranoid that everyone keeps track of what I wear).  When I started running to lose weight at the age of fourteen, I wore canvas knock-off Keds from Caldors that cost 4.99 and had zero support.  There was literally cardboard lining the soles.  Nowadays, if I take up running, I need to first drop a couple of hundred dollars on shoes, music for the perfect playlist, several moisture wicking sports bras, capris pants, tops, and socks.  Back then, I ran in whatever I wore to school that day and cardboard sneakers.  I didn’t even wear socks.

                My entire family was in the same boat.  Yet, at some point there was a shift.  Now we all own enough clothes to open our own stores, in every size, style, fashion, and in most cases, shoes to match.  I lost track of how many bags of my mother’s clothes we delivered to Goodwill.  There had to be two dozen.  Both closets in the master bedroom plus the closet in the guest bedroom and there were piles on the floor in front of the closets themselves.  And yet, if asked, I would have told you my mother doesn’t have a lot of clothes.  Odd that I persisted in thinking that, until the day we needed to pack up them up.  Then I realized she owned more clothes than a department store.

                Then there are the dishes.  When I was growing up, we had one set of dishes.  They were brown and beige, ugly but serviceable.  You could drop them on the floor and they wouldn’t break.  Hardy in construction, they were just the thing for a house filled with kids. 

                When my parents inherited some money in 1996, one of the first things they did was go out and buy a set of good china.  The china was broken a short time later.  It was so heavy, it pulled the cupboard out of the wall, shattering the dishes with a tremendous crash, in the middle of the night.  We all thought there had been an earthquake.

                Somewhere between then and now, my mother picked up over a dozen set of plates.  We have so many plates I don’t know what to do with them.  Hold a tag sale?  Give them away?  Donate them?  Some of them are fine china, some of them are that hardy serviceable construction I personally prefer, because they can be used in the microwave.  Want to hear something weird though?  No bowls. For some reason, we only have five bowls.  Somehow, we wound up with hundreds of plates but very few bowls.  Strange.

                We also have tons of fake flowers and vases.  Why?  Who knows.  My mother liked decorating.  Both she and my sisters are big on expressing individuality through decorating their personal spaces.  I am not.  I will move into a room, accept whatever condition it’s in, and take whatever furniture given to me.  I never think about buying furniture.  Why should I?  What I have works perfectly well.  I don’t care if it’s mismatched or a drawer is broken.  Someone else had to throw out my favorite armchair and buy a new one as a Christmas gift.  It broke and wouldn’t recline anymore, but I still used it.  I didn’t care. 

                Funny, that you don’t think about having all this stuff until tasked with cleaning it out.  Packing up my mother’s stuff has been a Herculean task, one that has mainly fallen to my younger sister.  But yesterday, I took a look at my sister’s stuff and my stuff, stuff that has to be moved, and it’s overwhelming.  How did we come to have so much stuff?

                Sitting right now writing this, from my chair, I can see the following items: Four boxes of envelopes that I salvaged from my mother’s bedroom.  An unopened comforter set I got for Christmas.  A bookcase full of books I never read, since I have a Kindle and prefer that.  In the closet, I know there is another huge carton of books, and there’s yet another carton of books under the bed.  (There is also a carton of books in the attic).  I spy an open spiral notebook.  Its use is unclear, but I’ve always been unable to resist buying cheap spiral notebooks.  At this point, it’s ridiculous.  I don’t write longhand anymore.  Haven’t in many years.  I own three laptops so the prospect of ever having to write longhand (unless we have some sort of disaster) is remote.  (And why do I own three laptops?  Well, one is a Google Chrome, and when I bought it, I was unaware that it doesn’t run Microsoft.  Subsequently, I bought a small notebook just to run Word.  Then I stepped on it, shattering the screen, which was too small anyway.  I could barely see what I was writing.  So, I bought the third laptop, the one I’m using now, but I hold onto the second because who knows, I might need it if something happens to the third, and I like to use the Google Chrome to go online.  Realize all us hoarders have a reason for hoarding).

                On the wall is a calendar dated April 2016.  On my dresser is an accumulation of perfume bottles, deodorant, and containers of lotion from the Bath and Body Works, all in various states of use.  Seems I can’t just use one, discard it when it’s done, and open the next.  Not me.  If I pick up something buy one get one free I need to immediately open and start using both, even if they’re the same.

                Within my line of sight is a Kindle Fire and a Verizon tablet.  (The tablet was used by my mother to play games, but it belongs to me).  I can also see the Sony E-Reader I received as a Christmas gift years ago, when such things were in their infancy.  It doesn’t light up like the Kindle Fire and the graphics are inferior, but there are still books on it that I haven’t read.  I can’t get rid of it just yet.

                There is a cart with wheels against the wall.  On this cart is a vast accumulation of crap, most of which I haven’t used in years.  Pots of hardened wax.  A slipper missing its mate.  I refuse to throw it out because heck, I may find its mate and regret it.  A small purse with my initials on it someone gave me as a gift.  I’ve never used it.  A CD case to the Tarzan soundtrack which I also own through I-tunes.  (Your guess is as good as mine if the CD is in the case).  Tubes of sunscreen.  My box of contacts.  Two lovely satin headbands with ribbons that are supposed to be tied behind your head.  Extremely cute.  I think I used one once in 2008, but never again because my hair is too fine to keep it in place.  The headbands kept sliding off my head.

                Stuff. Most of which I never use, have no immediate plans on using, but can’t part with, because heck, a month from now, I might have the burning desire to wax my face and damn, now I can’t because I threw out that ten year old pot of wax.  Now what will I do?

                Stuff is what we leave behind, stuff and the question why.  Why did my mother have so many bouquets of fake flowers?  I never noticed, until I could no longer ask her. 

                One day, all of us will depart this earth, and our loved ones will be left sorting through it all, wondering why we kept one slipper or why on earth we own so many copies of the movie Rudy.  In our stuff, we can trace what was important to us.  Our stuff becomes all that is left of us, our statement to the world, our identity.  Looking at my stuff, one can tell I love books, that I’m somewhat of a pack rat, and I fear waking up one morning looking like Yosemite Sam and not having the means to immediately deal with the problem. 

                What statement does your stuff make about you?