Stuff

I am a stuff person. I don't mean that I'm materialistic; to the contrary. I am drawn to things not because of their cost, but because of their personality, or history, or what they evoke in me. If I purchase something, the likely hood that it will ever be discarded into the garage sale realm is slim. Unlike the decluttering  and organizational books advise, I can not eliminate the things in my home which I don't find useful or beautiful, because I don't have such things. I love things for their, texture, their weight, their smell, for the storied past of those who have held them before.

When I was a child, I used to go with my mother to her grandmother's house. My great-grandparents had a house in town and a house in the country, so that when grandma Bessie passed away, grandpa Jess moved to town, and left the country house virtually untouched: sugar in the canisters, clothes in the closet, talcum powder in the loo. I played with toys there: an old Farris wheel that played music. I always had a vague notion that I could sense history, not in a grand sense, but in the small mundane miracle of someone else's daily life, children, a mother, a home...

The same is true with old books, generations before me, holding these selfsame sheaves of paper, living this tale beyond their own. Their weight and scent draws me in, as does their timelessness.

And new things, I believe I give a piece of my spirit to the things I choose to surround myself with. People have called my taste eclectic, I wondered if that was a platitude for "You have a lot of strange junk.", but it doesn't matter, our home sings a song of who we are as a family. I designed it when I wasn't singing, and every pent up expression of our love story flowed out of me as I chose windows,and faucets, and light fixtures, and it's harmony may be strange to some, but it is comforting and beautiful to us: the song of a homeland, and I hope, generations from now when I am gone, and my children's children's children come here, they hear it in their spirit, and it teaches them about where they came from and those who have lived and loved and gone before. Perhaps to you, they are just things, but to me they are stories of lives well lived.