To have less is more…smaller, tighter, cleaner, simpler… Stuff is not salvation….There is so much responsibility to stuff…Everything that was once the right size for five people is too big for two. Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
If you are one of my former students, you are probably shaking your head at my headline. The word “stuff” was forbidden in any paper you wrote for me. Hopefully, this column will add another reason to eschew “stuff.”
As my sister-in-law scanned our itinerary for a recent trip, she, who had visited several locations along our route, said that we would come across numerous antique shops along the way. “I know how much you enjoy stopping at antique stores.”
In the past, we have stopped at many an antique shop along our travels. We’ve bought items for our own home - stained glass windows, a buffet. When we’ve located something that we know a family member wants, we’ve bought it as a gift.
However in recent years, we’ve ceased adding more “stuff” to our home. In fact, we’ve begun to give “stuff” away. It’s been ages since we’ve stopped to look at antiques. These days whenever we pass an interesting looking shop, we always comment that in the past, we would have stopped. And we continue on down the road. For me, it’s no longer fun to look if I don’t plan to buy anything.
In addition to my sister-in-law’s comment about antique shops, I encountered another revelation about “stuff” on our latest trip. As we scraped, from a small canning jar, the last of the strawberry jelly that Amy had made, Bob moved to toss the container. I almost stopped him. The jar was perfectly good and could be washed and used again. Of course, we have such limited storage in our little RV that there really wasn’t a place to keep an empty jar.
I laughed. “People say we become more like our parents as we age. I think I’m more like my grandmother.” A surviver of the Great Depression, she saved anything she thought she could use again. Throw away a jelly jar? Heaven forbid.
When garments wore so thin that they had to be added to the rag bag, she removed all buttons to add to her button box. When I married, she gave me a starter button box from hers. I’ve rarely used any of the buttons, but I’ve dutifully added all of the extra buttons that come with new garments these days.
If those two incidents didn’t make me rethink stuff, I also read Quindlen’s Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake during this journey. This novelist reflects in this memoir on how her attitudes about “stuff” changed after she turned 50. She, too, has started to simplify, buy less, give away. She does confess to saving items that she thinks her adult children could use as they start their own homes.
In this book, Quindlen tells the story of a good friend and her family. In an attempt to teach their children what is of real value, the mother and dad limit the “stuff” in their homes to bare necessities. On the first Christmas Eve that their youngest was old enough to understand gift giving, each member of the family opened one present. The next morning when the child was led to his stack of gifts under then tree, he said, “But I already have one.”
As she cleans house, Quindlen uses the idea that one of most “stuff” is enough. In taking her new perspective even further, she says, “The reason we’ve made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures, but those four or five generations removed. It’s a quantum leap, from unthinkingly letting water run in the drain as you brush your teeth to global shortages of water when you great grandchildren are old people themselves. It’s probably unimaginable in any concrete way.”
In recent years as we travel, we consciously avoid buying souvenirs, stuff of any kind. Instead, we take a few photos and collect vivid memories that are fun to pull out and share with each other.
2018
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