Stuff

I tend to collect stuff. Lots of stuff. I have collections of masks, marionettes, fans, mason jars, stuffed dragons, books, postcards — I think I need to stop listing collections because I have far too many. Over the years I’ve accumulated stuff and occasionally consolidated and got rid of stuff. However, I still have a lot of stuff, both in my apartment and packed away in my parents’ attic. They tell me that I should take care of that stuff in the attic since they won’t last forever, “they” meaning my parents, who are slowly but surely trying to get rid of some of their excess stuff (often by giving it to me or one of my siblings so that we’ll have even more stuff).

As to why they want to get rid of their stuff: when my grandparents, Gammy and Pappy, went to live in assisted care, it fell to their sons to sort through a houseful of stuff. There was quite a bit of interesting stuff, but also a fair amount of junk. You see, my grandparents went through the Great Depression (and that’s how we’d hear about it, spoken in capital letters) and knew what it was like to have to do without. As a result, they learned to be thrifty, which meant saving. Everything.

Within their house were items that they had saved that made no sense whatsoever. Bags of nylon stockings (and probably other materials as well). Stacks of ice cream buckets. The plastic bags that came from the inside of cereal boxes. Used foil cupcake liners.

All of this stuff was organized — sort of. After all, Pap was OCD enough that he’d write the purchase date of every item he bought. Canned goods? Permanent marker to the lid. Lawn and garden equipment? Item and date recorded in grease pencil on the inside walls of the garage. Charming in a way: we ran into the person who bought the house after it was cleared out and she told us that her husband bought a new lawn mower and wrote the purchase on the garage wall.

However, due to the sheer volume of stuff and desire to get on with it, the three brothers started pitching stuff. They grabbed some things that they wanted but either threw away or set aside for consignment what they didn’t want. I stopped by and picked out a few things that I wanted but seriously? It was too much for me.

When I got home, I realized that I had actually stumbled on a treasure. In a wooden box, a simple thing with a picture of a dog on the lid, there were some old photos, a few postcards, some Victorian calling cards, and a manila envelope. Within the envelope were a few newspaper clippings and a couple of sheets of lined paper with careful handwriting.

I asked about this, managed to get a little bit of info from my grandmother, a little more from her sister. It seems that my great-grandfather, A.C. Swartz, was a trumpeter in the army. The pages I found were two poems that he had written, and that they were almost thrown away. I wonder what else we discarded that should have been kept?

This wasn’t the only case of history being lost. My great-grandmother lived next door to our house, our enclosed back porches adjoining. I was in and out of her house every day when I was little. I heard all of her stories, vignettes about growing up or about the items she had around her house. Once when I was attending Vacation Bible School at the United Brethren Church (I’ll explain about the church connections some other time), we were assigned to bring something “old” to show everyone. I went to Mom-mom and she found something for me in her attic: a metal purse, circa 1920. I don’t have the actual purse, but it looked something like this:

I also remember the story of the plate. This occurred well before I was born, but one day Pop-pop (my great-grandfather, Jerome) was going “up to town,” and asked his wife, Salome, if there was anything she wanted. She told him of the one thing she had seen and really, really wanted to have some day: a gold-rimmed plate. Jerome simply nodded and said that he’d see what he could do. When he returned, he didn’t bring her a plate — but an entire set of gold-rimmed dishes. She never used those dishes — at least, not in my memory — but kept them in a corner hutch, proudly displayed. Those dishes disappeared, along with all of the other things that made up Mom-mom’s house, when her youngest daughter and her husband moved in. I found a photo of how I think the dishes looked:

It’s not so much the stuff and having it that matters, but the pieces of history that have been lost. And even now I know that during my sorting of my past I’ve thrown away items that I now wish I had kept. And I certainly have too much stuff around this apartment, but who knows what will resonate with someone later?