Accumulation of Life

I'm not exactly sure what started me thinking of this. Perhaps it's all that stuff stored in our garage, or just thinking about stuff in general, the way it accumulates, almost without being aware of it; and also how hard it is to part with stuff once you've accumulated it. Some things we tend to keep because we think we'll be needing them; others because we just can't let them go, whether we need them any longer or not. Of course, much of this stuff has associations with our lives. We look at something and remember when we first acquired it, the circumstances surrounding it, the time and place. And so we store it away, almost as if we are putting away some part of ourselves, something we can later take out and look at and remember what it was like, what we were like, back then.

Photographs are that way too, which is why we hold onto them. We've all heard of those so-called primitive peoples who believe that photographs capture their souls, or their essence, or something like that. Perhaps they do. Certainly there is something captivating about photographs and the way they seem to freeze a moment in our lives. Who hasn't wondered what it would be like to step into a photo and re-live, if only for an instant, that particular moment in time. Before the advent of digital photography and cell phones with cameras, photographs seemed even more magical, and certainly took more thought and preparation. But my generation has grown up with near instantaneous and ubiquitous photography: the early Kodak Instamatics, then the Polaroids. It seems I always had some sort of camera handy to record my life. And after I married an inveterate photographer, things only escalated. As a result we now have a veritable archive of photographic records of ourselves and our families.

One thinks about such things when one packs up everything for a big move. When we relocated from Virginia to Texas a few years ago, we actually required two stages to collect all the things we had accumulated and stored away. First we packed up our condo and some of the things we had in storage. And a few months later, we returned from Texas to Virginia to collect the rest of the things we still had stored away in a large 10X15 storeroom at a Public Storage facility. Where had all this stuff come from? It was the accumulation of our lives: those things we'd bought or inherited that we wanted to keep, either for some future use, or simply because we did not want to part with them. In fact, a surprising number of items did turn out to be useful after we'd moved into a larger house. And once we'd acquired a large oversized garage with attic storage, we no longer needed to rent additional space.

We haven't given up entirely on deacquisitioning. From time to time we open a box of stuff and sort through it. We've given some away to local charities, sold some on Ebay, and hauled boxes of books to local used book stores. And yet it seems so much more remains to be sorted and disposed of. It's a slow process, because we have to consider each item before deciding what its final disposition should be. Many items, in addition to our lifetime accumulation of books, recall fond memories of Saturdays spent at estate sales and antique shops acquiring collectibles and vintage toys. Some of these things still have some value, but it's difficult to know what to sell and what to give away. I sometimes think I should just haul it all off to Goodwill or The Salvation Army.

But the real question is what to do once we've cleared everything out, not that I think that's really going to happen. We seem always to be adding more than we subtract. And yet at some point I suppose it must come to an end. And then there will be a serious clearing out. Who knows, maybe there will be an estate sale and strangers will wander among all this stuff and wonder where it all came from. Some may even find treasures here, as we once did, and thus our accumulation will add to someone else's. In The Berlin Stories Christopher Isherwood mentions this rather peculiar dolphin shaped clock that was in his room in Berlin, and when he returns years later, his former landlady gives it to him as a memento, and he marvels at how indestructible it was, and how emblematic it had become of that time of his life.

So it is with so many of these objects we accumulate. Perhaps that is why it is so hard to part with them. On the other hand, there are times when I think it would be appealing to strip away everything but the essentials and live in a very small and efficient space. It's my Airstream fantasy. We would have only what we need, the bare minimum, and would travel around the country towing our home behind us. But then I start to make a list of those essentials, and I wonder if that would be practical or even possible for someone like me. I would probably have to rent another rather large storeroom from Public Storage just to hold all those accumulated essentials that wouldn't fit in the Airstream.