Stuff

I have reached that magic age when people realize they must downsize. My parents had reached that age 38 years ago when I reappeared on their doorstep, husband in the grip of a premature midlife meltdown with a 5-year-old at my side. There was no doubt in my mind that I would be welcomed in my parents’ home while I straightened out my personal affairs—after all, my parents had taken in all kinds of strays, human and otherwise, while I was growing up—but our arrival forestalled any thought on their part of a smaller home.

I never did leave again. Sixteen years later my husband and I remarried and he moved into my childhood home. By then, things were considerably different: I owned the house, my father was dead, our son was on his way out the door for his last two years of college and, increasingly, I was helping my mother. In the continuum of our lives, she had moved into the in-law apartment my father created for my aged grandmother and where my son and I lived when we first arrived.

For many years after my remarriage the house was none too large. Even though our own son was gone, my husband’s boy from his interim marriage moved in and with him came an ever-changing cavalcade of friends, girlfriends, dogs and, eventually, grandchildren. In the full passage of time, they all moved on and my mother died. This old house, which has seen a potpourri of people pass through it in its 65 years as the family home, was unused.

I looked around and wondered what to do with it—what was worse, I wondered what to do with all the stuff that is in it. If you want to travel light in life, do not buy the family homestead!

First, the property will never truly be yours (yet another generation of youngsters is now growing up here). You may maintain it, heat it and pay the taxes but it is everyone else’s home too. You can expect wails of pain from four generations if you mention selling. And you can expect that many of the items in the house will have an emotional valence for those who grew up there even if they have no place in their own homes in which to put them.

We are not a terribly acquisitive family but we are keepers. My mother and father, only children, were the final repositories for items cherished by generations of large families. When the ancestral homes were broken up, the “stuff” was consigned to our attic, barn and various rooms in our large house.

Much of it has no monetary value. I have, for instance, a Tiger Cowrie shell my great-great-great-grandfather, a sea captain, picked up on some long-forgotten Pacific beach in the early 19th century and brought home as a gift for his patient wife—it is worth about 75 cents in a store but has sat on family mantels for more than 170 years.

Of more monetary worth is the same forebear’s sea chest. A classic six-board chest made from Maine pine, it has been around the world and back again but is now relegated to holding generations-worth of family photos, including that of the sea captain and his wife. On one end, scratched in a childish hand, are the names of two of George Moore’s daughters and his wife, Nancy—perhaps some bereft child’s way of sending a bit of herself along with a father who could be absent for years.

And then there is the china and the silverware. My great-great-grandmother on the other side liked dishes and we have enough to seat guests at a White House state dinner—albeit all mismatched. What am I to do with the dishes she and other grandmothers received as brides over the centuries? I have my own wedding china, my mother’s wedding china, my grandmother’s china and remnants of still earlier generations. Too much altogether—but what am I to do with it?

In the barn is the snappy little buggy—equivalent to a sports car today—that my grandfather used to court my grandmother. He was a bon vivant, a personality trait ill-matched to his life on the farm. He solved the problem of late nights and early mornings by curling up in the front seat and sleeping until his mare’s front hoofs hit the barn floor. My father had the buggy restored so he and my sister could play with it when she was a horse-crazy teen; my father and the horse are now long gone and the carriage remains—imbued with importance only by the stories that go with it and the memory of a vibrant, fun-loving man.

The house is packed with memories—memories we have created and memories that have been given to us by those that lived them. I love the memories and I love the thought that another generation is growing up treasuring the time it spends in our home.

It would be easier to make the needed changes if my own generation had been smart enough to produce heirs eager to assume the weight of all this “stuff,” but it is an enormous responsibility. It takes time to take care of and sometimes I ponder the need. Does preserving the presence of those who have gone before, as represented by special objects they once enjoyed, provide roots that give one a sense of self, an understanding of how we came to be who we are or is it a burden that prevents personal growth in new directions?

All I know is that my aging wreck of a house, which bespeaks my parents love for us, which shows the knocks and bruises inflicted on it by my siblings and me, which sheltered my son in times of trouble and which is now the playground of my grandchildren and great-nieces and nephews, has a powerful role in the annals of our family. If I let it go, if the little artifacts that recall the people who shaped our history are allowed to be dispersed and stripped of personal meaning, what will be the loss?