The Coffee Table

Breaking Out of Prison

Last June I made the concrete decision to sell my home. Recognizing that at the time of the sale I’d have to move all my belongings somewhere, I thought it best to get a head start on packing. After all, I had my late pack-rat husband’s lifetime collection of stuff in my Alpena-sized shed, in addition to my own belongings.  

I spent every waking moment from the end of June through mid-November sorting, tossing, packing and hauling stuff. Now it’s gone. Some is gone for good. Some is in storage, ready to be put in a moving van and hauled someplace new at a moment’s notice.

I still have stuff in my house—because I still live there. I have furniture enough to make it feel like home. Clothes, a few dishes, utensils, pots and pans. But  a half dozen rocking chairs, garden furniture, kitchen gadgets, framed art work, doo-dads, photographs, and sentimental mementos that used to take up household space  are gone.

And you know what? I don’t miss any of it. During holiday cooking, I finally found a use for the kitchen scale my son had passed on to me when he bought a new and improved one—but it was already packed. So I made do without—the way I’d always done prior to owning it. 

I no longer had a selection of pretty platters to choose from when serving the Thanksgiving roast chicken. Just one. Which worked fine. We used the flimsy flatware. The good stuff is packed.  

I don’t miss any of it. Which rather suggests I don’t really need it.

And since my home is on the market, I don’t buy things. I buy food. Soap. Toilet paper. Consumables. But I avoid buying stuff of a more permanent nature.

I am reminded of the time Hurricane Katrina did some house cleaning for me and my family. All that stuff that just went out to sea was forgotten before long. My new banjo. My favorite sandals. The dresser from childhood. 

Don’t get me wrong—I love my stuff. I packed it very carefully. With bubble wrap and spare towels and blankets for padding. I labeled all the glass items carefully, on all six surfaces of the packing containers.  “Fragile!”  “Glass!”  But now that it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. I am living just fine without it. 

I suspect there is a deep message in here. I could probably walk out of my house, leaving all the rest of the stuff behind—my carefully chosen mattress, my handmade quilts. I might pine briefly, but I’d get over it.

Our stuff seems important. It defines us somehow. We want friends to experience our stuff when they come to visit. We want our stuff to remind us of events, people, and places. But the reality is our acquaintances don’t care all that much about the stuff we display, and we don’t really need the stuff to remember the important times in our lives. I remember my late husband vividly, despite the purging of his possessions.

It’s so easy to become prisoners to our stuff.  

I went into a thrift store with a friend recently, determined that I didn’t need anything—after all, I am moving.  My friend bought three small matching glasses, and then determined that she would go home and find three things to get rid of. I think she’s onto something. But maybe she should get rid of four things.