I feel like I'm drowning in stuff--broken toys, flower vases, school notebooks, wires and cables, mismatched dishes. Where does it all come from? When I moved to college as a freshman I had a few suitcases and a few boxes. Everything my sister and I were taking fit in the family van. When I left college I had a bit more, but could certainly move everything myself. Over time things accumulate. Some of it is useful--furniture, bookcases, sheets and towels. A lot of it isn't. As our houses got bigger, we got more stuff. As our kids got older, we got more stuff. I'm ready to shed it. I'd like to rent a dumpster and throw it all away.
When we spent 6 months in Germany we knew we would be living in a furnished apartment, and took clothes and essentials. It was like heaven to live in a small 2 bedroom apartment. We had everything we needed, but not much more. True, even there we ended up needing to ship back boxes of things we couldn't carry, but everything was manageable.
My older son recently moved into his first solo apartment. I was envious. There was a closet sized kitchen, a completely adequate bath, and a reasonable living room and bedroom. I dream of how easy it would be to keep something that size clean and neat. How easy it would be to find anything you need. How liberating it would be to have so little room for stuff.
A few years ago my in-laws sold their home and moved into an apartment. Sorting through decades of stuff was a long and excruciating task. I hope to never be in that situation. I want to shed myself of those things early in life, stop bringing new junk into the house and throwing out what is here.
It occurred to me as a life course sociologist, that our belongings have a trajectory. We accumulate then discard. The economists like this inverted U shaped curve of life cycle accumulation. I'd like to be on the downside of the U...dis-accumulating.
When I was young, my mother gave me and my older sisters a Christmas present of treasure boxes. Small, metal utility boxes about the size of a shoebox. They even had keys. Their purpose was for us to be able to store our treasures, especially things we didn't want our younger siblings to mess with. Later, she gave us cedar chests, her version of a hope chest. I've thought about those boxes lately, I don't have the treasure box anymore, but I do have the cedar chest. It was my first piece of "nice" furniture, something to take with me when I left home. It is one piece of stuff I want to keep, one connection and memory I don't want to give up, one treasure I want to hold onto.
Some days I wish I was back in the time when all my treasures would fit into a shoebox and a cedar chest would hold hope.
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