Stuff

Step aside, George Carlin, I got stuff.  I haven't gotten  to the point of renting a storage unit yet, but it would solve some of the problems caused by accumulation of stuff.  Oddly enough, I'm not really attached to most of the things that qualify as stuff.  There is a certain number of things I can't do without, a lesser number of things I don't want to do without, and the rest I don't need or want.  But I keep them hanging 'round.  And I can reliably say that most of those things I did not buy, nor did Dave.  They just happened to enter our house and stay there.  One exception would be toys; the attic is loaded with old toys, and the parts of what were once toys.  Our cellar is full of paints and tools and hardware that landed on us from many sources.
      Again, I'll say I don't want or need most of the stuff in my house, but that doesn't mean that there is no sentimental or nostalgic connection with it.  After my father-in-law died, Dave's mother tried, mostly in vain, to sort out her life, and one of her starting efforts was in the basement of their house, attempting to put her life in order from the bottom up, so to speak.   She probably felt most and least connected to him there.  He was a mechanic and a craftsman, and the basement was loaded with the tools of his trade and of his hobbies, which included woodworking. It was not her venue, strictly his, so she must have felt proximity to him while also feeling estranged from his workplace.
      She started small, and sorted what must have been hundreds, even thousands, of screws and nuts and bolts and nails and hooks and the like.  She sorted them by size and purpose, into glass jars.  Many are still in our basement.  We  didn't really have a use for them; most often if Dave needed  hardware for any type of project, he'd go to Wiley's to figure out what to get.   But what do you do with something so remindful of a woman's agonizing attempts to try to re-start a life without her partner of close to half  a century. 
     From the time she was a little child, Dorothy liked pretty things.  I was always impressed with her ability to collect those things, even when anything tangible was hard to come by in our early circumstances. She would latch on to an old perfume bottle, a tassel, a shell, or a piece of  a broken comb, and play with them in the space beneath our old round dining room table, where she would crawl onto its large curved legs beneath the fringed tablecloth.  Later, when she saw something that caught her eye, say in Macy's--a miniature jewelry armoire, a soap dish, a figurine of a polar bear--she would buy it and often bought two, one of which she would give to me.  So now I have doubles of some items, and no place to put them, not in the  bare-bones architectural style of my house. 
    I realize the time is not far off when my stuff will threaten the sanctity of  order in the homes of others.  All the stuff will be someone else's burden, no longer imbued with the vapor of memory.  I know I won't really care at that point, but my mortal coil cries out for dispensation, or maybe I mean distribution.  Kind of like ashes. 
    When I say we grew up with almost nothing, that's not much of an exaggeration.  I remember an elementary school  classmate telling me one time that she'd gotten sick in the night and had thrown up all over her top sheet.  I felt shocked, and then embarrassed, at the awareness that I didn't know what a top sheet was.  We were lucky to have a bottom sheet. When I was a freshman in college, one of the New York City girls asked to walk with me from the campus to the athletic field. The day was chilly and she remarked that she'd called her mother that morning to have her send up her winter coats.  Winter coats!  Plural!  I was wearing my coat.  Singular.  I tended to avoid her after that; she was out of my league, with multiple winter coats.
    Our family ethic was not to throw anything away that was still of use, and I guess it stuck with me. Guilt  and sentimentality are more powerful than my puny attempts at divesting.  As a means of diverting some stuff from its entry into the maw of the Dumpster, I've been turning to eBay.  I could list at least a dozen items a day for more years than I have left, and I wouldn't be half way through  the contents of my house.  Moreover, only about 2% of my items sell, even at rock-bottom prices.  Who am I fooling anyway?  There's little market for jars of old nails, or even new holiday-themed mugs.