The Yard Sale of Life
Two days after my mom died, a realtor came to assess the value of her house so it could be put on the market. Two days after that, an estate sales expert came to assess its contents. My brother was eager to unload a property he had basically maintained for the last decade. Neither he nor my sister seemed to have any attachment to my parents’ home or their stuff.
Which left me the only one with a stake in any of it. I had exactly a week to decide what to keep and what to toss. Batting around for advice and suggestions from friends, I ran head on into what I call the Anti-Stuff Movement. Pretty much no one I spoke to encouraged me to salvage physical traces of my parents’ lives. At most, I was advised to walk away with “a few cherished (portable) items.” Some suggested taking pictures of things instead of keeping the things themselves.
I trace the ASM back to the Covid era when, cooped up for endless days amid our astonishing accumulations of stuff, we began working off physical restlessness by eviscerating cabinets, closets, basements, and garages. Enter Marie Kondo, the diminutive Japanese queen of pared-down living who gave us the psycho-spiritual mantra to only keep things that “spark joy.” Swedish Death Cleaning, the process of unloading stuff so your survivors don’t have to, has also entered the spotlight.
The urge to purge lies deep in the American psyche. Our nation was, after all, founded by people who left everything behind to live purely on their religious convictions. And who also happened to be Puritans, for whom attachment to any earthly goods and the desires they inspired were gateways to the devil. Americans don’t bother to regret the past—they simply reject it altogether. We strike out for the frontier. We burn bridges. We constantly “reinvent ourselves,” phoenix from the ashes. We are captivated by novelty—next shiny-object syndrome.
We have orchestrated a consumer culture to match. The whole point of “fast fashion” is to get something on your back before it’s gone out of style. I read somewhere that Americans average wearing each item of clothing only seven times. Given that clothing production and distribution rate high on carbon footprint, that seven-dollar hoodie is costing us all a lot more. I discovered the hard way that Ikea furniture is not built to last. Sadly, my parents’ durable “brown furniture” (a bizarre renaming of anything made of wood), some handed down from ancestors, some collected over years of frequenting antique stores, finds few takers on the current market.
New York City, my adopted hometown, constantly erases its past. The city has run out of land. So we raze buildings, blocks, and entire neighborhoods to make room for the new. But it’s far from clear that this kind of “renewal” heralds any improvement. In the Hamptons, monster mansions built five years ago are considered tear-downs. Nothing is ever big enough or new enough—despite the fact that many of these dwellings stand unoccupied during much of their short lifetimes.
People these days also seem to value experiences over stuff, which is cool. Wedding registries now include trips to the Galapagos, hot-air balloon rides, and Broadway show tickets alongside microwaves and blenders.
There’s also an ecological benefit to producing less stuff. Acres of trees have been saved since we moved documents and data onto the web, although once you factor in the computers, phones, tablets, chargers, cables, and peripherals—all made of non-biodegradable plastic and metal, with brief shelf lives and built-in obsolescence—we hardly come out carbon neutral.
SO WHO DOES COLLECT STUFF?
Scary versions of modern-day gatherers include hoarders, a group with a captive reality-TV show audience. We label hoarding as a disease, perhaps because its victims amass things of no value. Further, their loot is not saved in any recognizably organized way. No value + no sense = insane! Homeless people, with no apparent place to store their stuff, often make the extra effort to lug such collections around in shopping carts and garbage bags, keeping a watchful eye out for anyone who might steal it. While a significant proportion of the homeless are mentally ill, some observers suggest they pile up possessions, as do the rest of us, to feel “safe.” Living in deprivation engenders anxiety about future destitution.
There’s some logic in this. After all, animals store away food for the winter. Mormons stock a year’s worth of food so that they can remain self-sufficient during natural or manmade disasters. Following their lead, doomsday preppers stash all the accoutrements of daily life so that they can survive while the others of us go down. My parents, children of the Great Depression, have a historical reason to hang onto things: growing up in mass poverty, followed by wartime rationing, they’re hardwired to hold onto leftover sprigs of broccoli, slightly used foil, “scrap paper,” parts from broken appliances, marginally functional cars. Both of them stocked up on bulk sale items “just in case”: 48 refrigerator lightbulbs, countless sets of mechanical pencils, shelves of Campbell’s soup, dozens of aluminum baking pans.
While many virtuously scrape their homes free of unwanted possessions, I’ve been surprised how many of my friends admit to filling offsite self-storage cubes with housefuls of stuff. This sideways shuffle of belongings into long-term purgatory simply shifts one’s occupied square footage on the planet elsewhere, detaching storage from our homes to unseen sites. Of course, even when we do toss things out, at best they degrade in landfills; at worst they are shipped overseas to countries willing to stockpile our old cars, washing machines, and computers. Even our human remains have to go somewhere: Mausoleums preserve what’s left of the rich and powerful; graveyards and urns, the remains of the rest of us.
Meanwhile, our governments are busy stockpiling nuclear warheads that, with a bit of luck, will die in place. Corporations and governments harvest and save data on all of us: intangible stuff about how we live, what we read, and most importantly what we buy. Fields of massive batteries, many the size of small buildings, store power from wind and solar collectors. Seems everyone is hanging onto something.
THE UPSIDE OF SQUIRRELING
Of course, there are noble reasons to protect and preserve. Collectors of art and other cultural artifacts often make their findings available to the public via private museums like those of Isabella Gardner, Peggy Guggenheim, and J. Paul Getty. Some land in the Smithsonian Institution, the Louvre, the Victoria & Albert, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they enrich and illumine the lives of millions.
Books fill library shelves—though I’m curious as to the future of the world’s largest private collection of books: some 1.6 million owned by one John Q. Benham, stored in his home, 6-car garage, and yard in Avoca, Indiana. Libraries and museums both record and create our shared culture and history, for we only remember what we preserve. While imperialist Western nations are busy “repatriating” items purloined from other cultures, today’s scholars are salvaging oral histories of peoples less able or less interested in producing stuff. The U.S., founded on the annihilation of indigenous people and the forced immigration and dispossession of Africans, is all the poorer for practicing dominant-race-based collecting.
THE FAMILY LEGACY
My dad collected, among other things:
- antique tools
- decoy ducks
- horse-drawn sleighs (despite a lifelong distain for horses)
- boats (day sailers, Sunfishes, catamarans, dinghies, Boston whalers, canoes)
- Gravely tractors (12)
Books, books, and more books
My mom compiled:
- cookbooks (300-400, including one devoted exclusively to asparagus)
- kitchenware and tableware (hundreds of pots, crockpots, saute pans, lobster and asparagus steamers, fish poachers, bundt pans, mixing bowls, serving bowls, blenders and mixers and electric frying pans and waffle presses, coffee makers, tea pots and tea cozies, table linens, sterling and stainless platters, dishes, and flatware, and more . . .)
- holiday décor (two walk-in closets worth of Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and birthday paraphernalia, as well as wrapping paper and ribbons for all occasions)
- dozens of baskets, a puzzling but surprisingly common collectible
- everything my siblings and I ever made (drawings, construction paper Christmas tree garlands and glitter strewn Styrofoam Christmas tree balls, misshapen papier mache animals, a patchwork quilt whose creation consumed one high-school summer, my graduate-school architecture models, every comp-lit paper I wrote while ploughing my way through a Ph.D.)
- 16 bankers’ boxes of family photos (you do the math), which have found their way into my basement for rainy-day perusal. It took my sister and I a day and half to go through two boxes at my mom’s house last fall, so my basement haul may well be there indefinitely
Mom’s filing cabinets housed folders devoted to gingerbread houses, holiday greens, guest lists and menus, her (long deceased) parents’ health insurance claims, notebooks detailing what to pack and what to wear on various trips (she and my dad), and more.
What does this stuff mean—to me? To anyone whose lives my parents touched? To total strangers?
My parents were not broadly social people. Aside from some long-term friendships with couples encountered through my dad’s medical practice, parents of our school friends, and neighbors, my parents lived pretty solitary lives. They neither sought nor expected recognition or praise, much less fame. My dad did love to ramble on to anyone who would listen about his latest home-improvement project, like the deck he built and (at age 88) rebuilt at the East Hampton house. And what he had learned from the authors whose work he read serially and in depth: Joseph Brodsky, Vaclav Havel, Isaiah Berlin, Warren Buffet, Gabor Mate, organic farmer Joel Salatin, Oliver Saks. An astonishing range of thinkers and writers devoted to the human project. All of whose books he lanced with dozens of post-it notes marking pages and passages.
I saved his voluminous handwritten letters, in which he would typically start with a comment on a questionable American Express charge on a shared account, drift into macroeconomics or the technology of financial transactions, migrate into the pitfalls of Soviet socialism, and land either in Buffet’s capitalist empire or Brodsky’s life as intellectual in exile. All topped off with praise or warning about my current course of action concerning home operations in East Hampton.
A selection of those musty books currently sprawl across my dining-room floor, baking out years spent in dusty outbuildings; the letters fill a box in my bedroom closet. I designed a lucite “Frost box” to display the tomes that formed the life work of his Princeton mentor, Robert Frost biographer Lawrance Thompson.
My mom, I discovered, kept her passions much more to herself. That cookbook collection, for example: the only time any of us plumbed her knowledge of cooking was when as a teenager I expressed an interest in baking. Only then did she pull out volumes, and only ones directly related to the topic at hand. None of her offspring shared her love of a well-appointed home and her somewhat rigid adherence to entertaining etiquette. But when I handle her linen tablecloths and sterling silver, I remember her methodical Thanksgiving preparations, which began weeks before with baking and freezing pies, polishing silver and ironing linens and finished with making the gravy and whipping the cream on the big day.
For decades I used my parents’ house as an offsite storage facility for my own stash. My childhood desk held high-school yearbooks, slides of my artwork, diplomas, more photos, and letters from parents, relatives, and friends—along with odd items like sealing wax, porcelain figurines, an illustrated Tale of Two Cities, and a miniature wooden sleigh crafted by my dad.
In the attic of their barn, I found more remnants of my past:
- Notebooks and papers from Stanford, Harvard and Princeton courses
- My undergraduate thesis on Mies Van Der Rohe, with oodles of negatives from visits to his buildings
- My Princeton comparative-literature dissertation—may iterations, with notes from meetings with my three advisors
- My “alternate” Princeton dissertation, a work of creative writing about the writers I most loved
- Artworks from high school, including a glorious summer of art school in Provence, Stanford (where I found time to moonlight as a graphic designer), and Harvard
- Architectural drawings and models from my brief foray into architecture school
- More letters . . .
I used to think it was my responsibility to preserve these traces of my life for future biographers. Now it’s hard to say who, if anyone, will take the time to sort through my now culled-down collection. While I truly enjoyed perusing my parents’ remainders, I was surprised that my siblings showed little or no interest in any of their stuff. I don’t have a husband, or children, or grandchildren of my own who might attach some sentimental value to my stuff. A more rational and generous version of myself would begin Swedish Death Cleaning this afternoon.
Yet to me, these boxes reveal my identity. I’m not a Collector of Things. I even created an art project in which I systematically gave away everything I owned, only to discover that more stuff kept coming at me. A few years ago, I took the common advice of disposing of any clothes I hadn’t worn for two years. The idea was, those items were taking up space which could now be used to purchase clothes I would wear. Except I never acquired replacements. Instead, my closet remains half empty—sacrilege in a city where many women turn their kitchen cabinets and oven into overflow clothing storage.
I don’t, like the rest of my family, acquire real estate. I’m a lifelong renter and subletter with an apartment full of hand-me-down furniture. The East Hampton house, which for years I rented from my parents, was my dad’s dream of rescuing me from excessive travel by grounding me in one place. Alas, I made some two-dozen trips to Asia in the first two decades of life there, circling the Earth two and a half times in one rather active year.
I was always drawn to the minimalism imposed by camping and would do just fine in a convent. Sensing this, my boyfriends often left no more than mixed tapes behind when we parted ways.
So besides the aforementioned books, papers, and artworks, I currently possess some highly curated books, furniture, and household items from my parents. Included among these are two musty boxes of family history, recording back to when the first Nesbitt left his past behind and struck out for the New World in the 1620s. As I recline in a rocker built by an ancestor two hundred years ago or host tea on my mom’s Royal Albert Heirloom, it all reminds me of where I come from and therefore who I am. It’s not just stuff!