The Stuff We’re Made Of

I just moved again.  I’m not sure if each time gets easier or harder.  It certainly has made me realize how much stuff I have accumulated in my life.  My first move was from my three story home on the lake to a rented mobile home.  I had to let go of many things then; my house, my land; a place for my children that would always be their home to come back to.  Included with all those life attachments was a house packed with stuff – stuff in the attic, in the basement, in the garage, in closets, in drawers and cabinets.  My family, friends and I filled boxes, bags, totes and trash loads full of crap that had somehow become a part of my life.  Even after throwing so much away, without my house, I had to rent a storage unit because I still had more then I needed.  The new place I moved into has a basement, so I can once again have all my stuff back together – like some great reunion – surrounded by all my things once more.

When I was growing up, my father had a cellar full of stuff.  We never referred to it as a basement.  It was the cellar.  My mother never called it stuff back then, she called it clutter.  I suppose my father could have been considered a hoarder before hoarding was made into some popular television condition.  At least he confined his hoarding to his cellar.  Whatever anyone needed, it was down there – somewhere.  Not to the untrained observer.  To any unknown party, the cellar would have been considered a pile of junk.  To my father,  however, it was more so an eternal collection pit of needful things.  Screws, tools, electrical cord ends, rags, old appliances, half filled paint cans, paint thinners, sprays, nuts and bolts, and everything in between.  I’m not sure how Dad every worked down there or how he ever found anything, but he did.  “Ya, I’ve got that down cellar somewhere,” he would say.  And he usually did find it, eventually.  Sometimes Mom would get exasperated with him, always hopeful he’d clean up that mess, but I think she knew it was a hopeless cause.  I believe there comes a time for most of us, when we love someone enough, where we accept them the way they are.  I suppose that’s what Mom grudgingly did with Dad and his cellar.

That old cellar was leaky and musty.  It’s funny how I still love the smell of old, damp, musty places.  There was something about it; like it was part of the earth itself.  And my father was a collector of its parts to keep for anyone who needed anything.  He would putter down there for hours.  That’s what my mother called it – puttering – she never called it working.  Dad skinned deer down there; fixed things for friends and neighbors; did projects with my kids; at times I think he even brooded down there, because Dad wasn’t the type to let anyone know he was mad about something.  He’d just go down in his cellar for a spell.

When my sisters, brother and I had to clean Dad’s cellar out after he died, it was a lot of work.  But there was something about it that was also a rewarding experience.  It brought us great pleasure and fond memories of Dad and who he was by sorting through his vast collection.  It was the same when our mother passed and we cleaned out the house together.  I can still picture my brother bringing loads of things out of the closet and all of us laughing together.  In such a time of sorrow, somehow those things that belonged to our parents gave us comfort and bonded us.

I will always remember the cellar as Dad’s little part of the world.  I suppose every person needs that – a place for their stuff – to make them feel comfortable, however few or many those things may be.  A cellar full, a storage unit full, a house full; all our stuff, junk, crap and clutter somehow make a statement.  Our stuff truly does make us feel part of who we are.