Decluttering is the rage. Like snakes, we’re supposed to shed, not our skin, thankfully, but our beloved possessions. We’re supposed to make it easier for our kids, you know, for later.
Well, to that I say, “bah” and “hah.” Let the kids worry about all our stuff later. I mean, really, didn’t we put up with all their stuff and shenanigans for a very long time? I mean, really!
So, with that in mind, I would like to pay homage to all my cherished stuff which I intend to hold on to until death do us part.
I have to hold on to my material goods, you see, because they don’t just represent household belongings. They represent my family. My history. They are, in fact, a museum . . . The Museum of Me and My Kin.
A few years back, my husband and I moved into a new house in a new state to begin a new phase of our lives. Yet for all that newness, our house was instantly over-stuffed with memories. Those memories arrived in a packed-to-the-rim 79-foot-long moving truck. According to the mover’s inventory, there were 180 pieces of furniture and 220 boxes.
Several bulky pieces had belonged to my grandmother, part of a wildly extravagant shopping spree on her one trip home to visit her family in Hungary in 1929 — two decades after she immigrated to the US.
That return trip home in the midst of the Great Depression was the last time she would see her parents. The Nazis saw to that. When she left them as a 12-year-old, she was poor. Returning to visit, she was a fancy American lady. Well-dressed. She brought gifts for everybody, and she also shopped.
Stored in the ship’s hull, sailing back to the US, were an elaborately carved walnut couch and matching chair; an equally ornate coffee table; a massive china closet; a narrow parquet side table that magically opened to seat 14 people; and cartons of delicate fine china and hand-embroidered linens.
Grandma cherished these items and devoted much care to their upkeep. She polished the furniture lovingly and used the dishes only on the most special of occasions.
A worker at the dry cleaners lost one of the tablecloths, and my hardly diminutive, 5-foot-10 grandma decked him!
These items weren’t just displays of her comparative wealth. They were the reminders of who and what she had left and lost in Europe. They were irreplaceable.
For a time after Grandma died, her possessions were scattered among the family, but eventually they all wound up in my home.
“You’re the sentimental one,” said the relatives as they happily shed the clunky, old-fashioned items. And it’s true, I am the sentimental one. The deep emotional history of the musty furniture and linens outweighs any simple cost-per-item calculation or desire to modernize.
Thanks to my grandmother and now, also my late mother’s largesse, I have closets, cabinets, couches and walls overflowing and over-decorated with embroidered, knitted and needle-pointed pictures, pillows and afghans.
Add to the inventory: 21 handmade, banquet-size tablecloths and matching napkin sets, lace doilies, guest hand towels and a brush and comb holder.
And, of course, the art, music, photos, drawings and knick-knacks my husband, children and I have enthusiastically (and overabundantly) added to the mix.
On the one hand, I am grateful and frankly still amazed to think that in just two generations after my family fled poverty and oppression in Russia, Romania and Hungary with nothing, I now “suffer” from overabundance and the dilemma of where to place so much “stuff.”
Yet, while I feel joy, I also feel sad. Most of my immediate family is gone. As I sit at my mother’s desk, in my mother’s chair, recalling how meticulously she worked at her typewriter and adding machine, writing out checks and preparing billing statements for my father’s electrical contracting business, I also think about how many decades have passed since they both died.
As I polish the silver I inherited and dust the intricate furniture, I recall misunderstandings, ill-timed words, fights and illnesses.
But for all that, mostly I smile as I sit or walk through this Museum of Me. Because for all the familial clutter, this I know: I cannot shed a single item. Each one tells a story . . . the story of me and my family.