Stuff: An Alphabetical Account of Accumulation
A. Attachment
We all have stuff. Most of us are attached to our stuff, at least to some of our stuff. I am attached to the big comfy bed I share with my husband Robby. When I am away from Seattle, I can hardly wait to come home and sleep in that bed. Or to lounge in the old leather recliner that conforms to my body. I am attached to my piano though I rarely play it now; and I am attached to the ukulele I have recently taken up.
I am attached to gifts from people I love: 28 years ago, Robby gave me a carved cedar Tsimshian dragonfly house panel as a breaking up gift. I had admired it when we were together in Victoria, British Columbia, and he sent it to me after we were apart. Now we are together again—for 25 years—and the dragonfly covers a whole wall of our living room.
Vi Hilbert, Skagit tribal elder of western Washington, my teacher and treasured friend, once gave me a string of “Happy Beads” to wear around my neck. When I move, the olivella shells and beads clitter-clatter like the call of a kingfisher. Vi was wearing her “Happy Beads” in her casket at her funeral and I was wearing mine as I stood in front of her for the last time.
B. Burning
In Indian Country of Puget Sound, after someone passes over to the other side, an Indian doctor will carry out a burning; he will place the deceased’s most closely held possessions one at a time on the flames, like gifts offered to royalty. A month after Vi passed away, her cousin Dobie held a burning for her at Vi’s daughter’s property at Bow in Skagit County. One fire for a plate of chicken crepes, salmon, boiled potatoes, and corn; a second fire for Vi’s black dress, alpaca wool shawl, and Pendleton blanket.
I wonder if any of my things will need to be burned when I die. They say that the spirit will linger too long if certain things are not burned and that this lingering is dangerous for those on both sides. Sometimes a second burning has to be done. Vi said her mother came back for the house Vi’s father built. That’s why it caught fire in a lightning storm and then had to be burned ritually, the whole house sent to Vi’s mother.
C. Clutter
Stuff spreads. Stuff attaches to itself, layers over itself, piles up, and overflows; At some point it becomes clutter. But what is clutter? Is clutter worthless stuff? Good stuff? Too much stuff? Or just disorganized stuff?
Clutter coaches like the famous Marie Kondo claim they can come help you clear your clutter. For a fee, say $30 to $90 per hour. Some of us tolerate clutter better than others. Those differing tolerances can collide in marriages, among siblings, housemates or colleagues. Clutter has consequences.
D. Downturn
What do we do with our stuff during an economic downturn? Do we hang on to as much as we can? Sell off stuff we never use? Or get rid of enough stuff so we can move to a smaller house, condo, apartment, or hovel?
My grandparents hung on to stuff. The impact of the big downturn—the Great Depression—still rules lives. My grandpa saved cigar boxes, bottles, lighters, pencils, marbles, matchbooks. He moved his family from place to place in Oklahoma to work gas fields or oil wells. Each time my grandfolks moved, they took all their stuff. They still had their stuff when we visited them in summers of the 1950s and 60s. One summer Grandma gave me two perfume bottles and a matching jar for bath powder. Another summer, Grandpa gave me two mason jars, one full of marbles, the other full of mechanical pencils; they now sit on my shelf like pickled vegetables, opalescent olives and metallic runner beans.
Is our stuff valuable just because we collect it? Because we envision our stuff in a starring role on Antiques Roadshow? Or is it because we remember a story Grandpa told about winning that big speckled marble?
E. Electronic Storage
With the personal computer in the 1970s came the concept of The Paperless Office. In this ultra-bright future, everything is kept only on the computer, leaving desktops clean and clear. The geek at the Apple Store tells me that iCloud will solve my storage problems. I imagine my thousands of pages and hundreds of files floating among fluffy cumulus. I have now signed on to the clouds. For backup I still use a thumb drive; I slip its cord over my head and wear all of my documents like a locket.
Still my world overflows with paper. I keep printed copies of everything: I want to have physical pages that I can touch or come across while leafing through files; I want to stumble upon an idea about lush Mayan embroidery, liana hanging from trees, dark chocolate, and marimba music; I want to ponder it and then write the story these images engender.
F. Fear
I fear that as soon as I toss something I have written, I will regret it.
G. Gather
Gather up your valuables in one suitcase. Prepare to evacuate. When this warning sounds, you have minutes to decide which stuff to gather. Fire burns toward you, or the river rises, or the hurricane approaches your shore. You jump to, pumped with adrenaline. You open a jewelry box and get your grandmother’s wedding ring, your mother’s string of pearls, a pocket watch, and a charm bracelet you started when you were ten. You might grab your clarinet, your passport, cash you have stashed inside certain book covers. You might take your laptop computer or disks. A gold coin. Certificates of birth, marriage, death. Old photos. The family Bible.
Robby’s 91-year-old Aunt Ruby got a call from her son at 3 AM on September 13, 2008. Ruby gathered her stuff in a single suitcase, got in her son’s car and they were the last ones to drive out of Port Bolivar, Texas, before Hurricane Ike roared in. Mud filled Ruby’s little house up to six feet. Mud pushed her stuff out into the large muddy world of the Gulf Coast.
Ruby returned to her home as soon as she had running water and a bed; she was done being a refugee. Now Ruby rolls her wheelbarrow out each afternoon to search through the field behind her house. She digs in the mud with her hands; she is delighted when she pulls a dinner plate or a salt shaker out of the mud. She brings her finds back to the house to hose them off, to reclaim her stuff.
Refugees from wars sew valuables into a coat lining or a skirt hem and trek across borders, from Germany, Tibet, or Kosovo. Or they pile into little rafts from Viet Nam or Cuba. They flee Rwanda, Zaire, or Darfur, Afghanistan or Syria, refugees from machetes AK47s, or barrel bombs. Some of them are lucky if they have any of their stuff with them. But if they can, they will gather things. The bright and narrow beam of danger emblazons what they must take. Would it be useful—minus the danger—to gather what we would take?
H. Here somewhere
My mother keeps lots of stuff: books about positive thinking and books about death and dying. She saves catalogs that vend angel wind chimes, yoga cushions, plug-in waterfalls, and bamboo towels. My mother has stacks of mail on her dining table, coffee table, side table, computer table. When mail arrives, she rips it open and then puts it down. Wherever. She throws some stuff out, but not enough to keep pace with the inflow.
Once I called my mother to ask for a copy of my father’s death certificate. “It’s here somewhere,” she said. Over the phone I heard her shuffle paper. “I know it’s here somewhere.” I heard her move from room to room. “Oh. It might be in the freezer,” she said. “I heard that was a safe place to store documents.” I heard her open the freezer door, heard a crackle as she pulled out a frozen zip-lock bag. “I’ve got it.” If you just hang on to stuff, then it’s always here somewhere.
I. Indecision
Sorting is hard. It means making decisions about everything you pick up. Sara Caputo, founder of Radiant Organizing, says that if it takes you more than 15 seconds to locate files and papers, then you need the F.A.T. System! You just File, Act on, or Toss everything on your desk every day. I can only do this if I also have an indecision pile.
From the top of my indecision pile, I pick up the Swanson’s Nursery coupon. It offers 10 per cent off on a sunny day or 30 per cent off on a rainy day. I want to do some planting so I consider Seattle’s weather forecast. I consider the expiration date and whether I can swing free on a rainy day between now and then. I consider whether a 10 per cent discount is even worthwhile, consider tossing the coupon, consider leaving it in the pile. In the end, I go out and stick it on the dashboard of my car. If it starts to rain while I am running an errand, then I will have the thing handy. Okay, next item.
J. Junk
Some stuff is junk. Webster tells us junk is “old iron, glass, paper, cordage, other waste which may be treated so as to be used again in some form.” Sounds like recycling. We have the junk man, junk heap, junkyard, junk pile, junker, and piece of junk. Just hearing these words will fire up those who believe that “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.”
So junk—a bit, piece, chunk, lump, scrap—has the potential to be found, resurrected, and transformed into something useful, even cool. But how much junk do we need in order to turn even a single piece of it into that new cool thing? And will we ever actually do this?
K. Keep
Everyone keeps some things. Some of us keep a lot of things. I am a keeper. I come from a line of keepers. My father came from Kansas farmers and my aunt and cousins still farm there. They grow wheat and milo. They used to keep cattle and chickens. Their freezer holds a side of beef. They preserve green beans and corn. They put up tomatoes and pickle cucumbers. Their cherries, apricots and peaches yield jams, jellies, and pie fillings. Their apples go in to applesauce. Larkspur petals are pressed flat between pages of the Bible. Keeping is a way of life for people with deep roots.
I keep musical instruments. On our trip to Hawaii I bought a ukulele for $70. I can play six chords, which yields a lot of songs. I imagine I will continue to play my ukulele, but then I imagined I would continue to play the used accordion that now snugs up against my winter clothes in the back of the closet.
L. Love
Some of my stuff conveys love: a hexagonal-pattern quilt my great-great-grandmother stitched is handed down through generations; a tiny cedar root basket Vi gave me with instructions to pass it on to my niece when the time comes. The quilt and basket remind me that my great-great-grandmother’s time came and Vi’s time came and my time will come, and it reminds me of the love that is passed on with these treasures.
M. Memory
I keep stuff that helps me remember: post cards, ticket stubs, coasters, maps, matchbooks. I keep writing notebooks, jottings, clippings, lists. I keep morning pages and evening scrawls. My memory is limited and that is why I write and why I keep what I write, even the tangential, the sidebar wanderings, the writings to infinity, pieces that will never tie together no matter how many sailor’s knots I learn. I keep them to remember my mind.
N. Neatniks
Neatniks keep their stuff neat. That allows them to keep more stuff. I have an occasional neatnik urge. I am one of fourteen owners of a property plagued by fraud, fire, and foreclosure. The legal fallout has lasted two years and is still not resolved. For a few months, I let the documents and my notes from conference calls spread over my desk, the table, and designated parts of the floor. One day during a call with the attorney, I could not put my hands on a needed document. So I spent an entire weekend organizing it all. When I finished I walked out the door and down the street toward the lake and gardens and the unofficial dog park with a neatnik bounce in my step.
O. Oral Culture
Vi Hilbert came from an oral culture. Nothing was written. No paper. No pen. If you wanted to remember something you memorized it. Vi said people were expected to remember something after hearing it four times. Vi worked to preserve her native language, Lushootseed; she taught Lushootseed words, names, syntax, stories, places, roots, ethos.
Oral cultures have been lost and will be lost, unless they are caught in time and saved. Vi spent the second half of her life catching and saving Lushootseed. Now Vi’s papers are in Suzzallo Library and her recordings are in Ethnomusicology, both at the University of Washington. This is where she taught, where she repeated stories four times, where she shared her oral culture.
P. Pack Rat
Pack rats are rodents who build complex nests called middens. They search for materials to bring back to the midden. If they find something they want, they will drop what they are currently carrying to pick up the new item. Like a wolf marking territory, a pack rat urinates in its midden; the sugar in the urine crystallizes as it dries out, thus cementing the midden together. A pack rat midden may preserve the materials incorporated into it for up to 40,000 years, providing scientists with a record of vegetation and climate.
A human pack rat is a compulsive hoarder who—likely from past hardship or deprivation—fills her house, attic, basement, garage, car, front porch and back yard with stuff: old stuff: new stuff, found stuff, family stuff, worthless stuff, and treasures. I think of my Aunt Babe in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. Once when my family visited Aunt Babe, she gave me a four-octave marimba that had been stored in pieces under her front porch. We drove back to Kennewick, Washington with two rows of rosewood keys, and two rows of metal resonating tubes strapped to the top of our blue Plymouth station wagon. I was ecstatic.
My sister married a pack rat. He sorted through dumpsters, junk piles, and construction sites. He screeched his truck to a stop if he saw a castoff chair or a kitchen sink on the side of the road. He brought it all back to their bungalow in Seattle’s Central District. He put the stuff everywhere, even in my sister’s empty-on-purpose dance practice room. She hauled it out. He brought more stuff: cases of pull-dated Pillsbury Hungry Man biscuits and a file cabinet with the bottom drawer missing. She hauled it out. The last time he dumped his stuff on her dance floor, she hauled herself out. There are dangers in every extreme.
Q. Quirks
Some people squirrel their stuff away. Others have all their stuff out for show. Yet others give stuff away as fast as they receive it.
R. Release and receive
The idea is that if we throw some of our stuff out, new stuff will come, the stuff we really want. We must first make space for the new, like ending a dead-end relationship in order to make room in your heart for your one true love.
S. Storage unit
A storage unit is a seductive siren posing atop empty rock caves to sing in the sailors with too much cargo in their holds. And Americans are following the siren call in huge numbers. There were 52,000 self-storage facilities in the United States at the end of 2007. One in ten Americans rents a storage unit. A storage unit is a safe haven for people with stuff. A storage unit is where baby stuff—crib, stroller, basinet, car seat, baby backpack, baby clothes, baby gate, baby swing, and baby toys—can go between babies. A storage unit is the place your stuff goes when you are between homes, when you work overseas for a year, or when you declutter your home.
I should confess here that we have a storage unit. We got it when 26 boxes arrived from Texas, stuff from my in-laws’ house, stuff that would not fit on our not-so-big houseboat. There is a difference between having a storage unit for a short time and for a long time. So far, ours is for a short time. But I fear it could become a long time. Out of sight, out of mind applies here. Life is demanding. Having your stuff in storage means that that stuff is not making demands on you. Except for paying the cost of the storage unit.
T. Throwers
Throwers are able to throw their stuff. They are decisive, can discern which things to keep and which things to toss to the winds of recycling, Goodwill, or Half Price Books. I think of throwers as feathery, airy; they float lightly on the earth. Dwell magazine features photos of throwers in their clean Zen homes, enticingly empty of excess stuff. I admire throwers.
U. Useful
How do we know what will be useful in a week, a month, a year, or ten years? What if, in a fit of throwing, we toss the most useful things we have ever owned, say an old three-speed bike or a crock-pot?
What if our stuff is potentially useful but remains unused? Sometimes I go through my closet and try on clothes I never wear. They fit. They even look good. But are they useful to me—my sweeping black velvet cape with a green satin lining or the tight-weave vest from the Peruvian Andes? Divining the usefulness of things feels mystical to me.
V. Voluntary Simplicity
Friends are exploring the idea of voluntary simplicity. They only get books
from the library now; they consider having one car instead of two, maybe a Smart car. They give away anything they haven’t used in a year. But then I discovered they have a secret storage unit where they keep collections of videos, bolo ties, vintage Hawaiian shirts, boxes of books, and fishing gear. Now they are getting rid of the storage unit to arrive at sweet simplicity.
Voluntary complexity, on the other hand, embraces a messier model of life, one that leaves stuff in its wake like piles of driftwood, kelp, stone, sea glass, plastic trash, and messages in bottles tossed ashore by ocean surge.
W. Will
What happens to our stuff when we die? That is determined by our will. Some people leave everything to their spouse or kids. Others detail who will inherit the Bluthner piano, diamond earrings, Mikasa dishes, stamp collection, military medals, salt and pepper shakers, sable stole, or Beanie Babies.
Some approach death with a loosening grip on stuff. Robby’s father built the family a 4,000-square-foot home in 1954. Two years ago, he was thrilled to get rid of the house and all the stuff it held. Now he lives in a tiny assisted-living apartment and does his best to empty it out. Each time we visit he gives us stacks of mail he has received, photos we have mailed him, a sun hat, a suitcase. On our first visit there, he pointed to his computer and said, “This TV can go away.” If my mom moves to an apartment, there will be lots of stuff in her place that will have to “go away.” The children of elders then are tasked with making stuff “go away” and often it becomes “taking home.” By laws of inheritance, stuff moves down the generations.
X. x = missing item
x is the thing you are looking for, your recently deceased father’s life insurance policy or the warranty on your washing machine that broke down again or your mother’s recipe for jalapeño cornbread. Where is x? A thrower can’t be sure she didn’t toss it. A keeper knows it is here somewhere. A neatnik might know just where to look. How we seek and whether we find x and how long that takes depends on how we deal with our stuff.
Y. Yearn
I yearn to be a thrower. I tell myself that after we get new health insurance, after my mother’s broken arm heals, after my nephew’s wedding, after I transcribe the rest of my interviews with Vi, after I plant pansies, snapdragons and euphorbia, after our legal mess is settled, after my friend Sandra gets through this experimental chemo, after I delete a thousand old e-mail messages, after a trip to Texas to visit Robby’s dad, after the swine flu pandemic has passed, after the samba band plays at Folklife Festival, and after my 40th high school reunion, then I will sort and throw out some of my stuff.
Z. Zen
In the end we will need none of our stuff. Death finds us scoured and carrying only what is in our hearts.
“Stuff: An Alphabetical Account of Accumulation” first appeared in The Texas Review (2011)
©2015 Janet Yoder ALL RIGHTS RESERVED