April 16, 2025–Round and round we go, cleaning house, sorting records, purging junk, burning memories.
It never ends. No matter how many times we attack the piles, junk drawers stay junky. Bookshelves groan with tomes we’ll never read. Closets stay crammed with fashions from the last century (literally), that fit neither fashion sense nor body shape. Yet we can’t bring ourselves to burn ‘em, bury ‘em, or bundle ‘em to the thrift shop.
What is this irrational need to hang on to stuff?
Part is sentimentality. No, I’ll never read that joke book I bought in the 1964 Scholastic Book Fair, but there is my name inside the cover, and maybe someday my great grandchild will marvel at what his great granddad thought was funny.
I’ll never again put on that crushed blue velvet tuxedo I wore to prom, but… well, it’s a crushed blue velvet tuxedo!
I’ll never display that trophy I earned in 4-H, but it is the only tangible proof that I once was the top Junior Hereford judge in the state of Iowa.
And maybe that’s the answer. We see other people’s stuff as junk; we see our stuff as artifacts inside a museum to ourselves. In those books, binders, and boxes of detritus live our memories.
I finally came up with a hack to help in the winnowing. Imagine that day when we become ghosts. We are floating around the old homestead, making noises in the kitchen at night and haunting our offspring after they ate too much mac and cheese. Which of those materials things left behind will matter to them?
Answer? Not a single thing. Or maybe a single thing. What thing of your grandparents do you still have and cherish? Maybe an old cast iron skillet she used to fry chicken in, or a quilt she made from scraps of grandpa’s holey flannels. Maybe a birthday card with her handwritten note in the margin, telling you not to spend that dollar in one place.
Or maybe no object at all. Maybe memories are meant to be only memories.
So here I go again. Cosplaying as a ghost, I walk through my house from time to time. Here’s what I always decide: It can all go.
Here’s what I always do about it: Nothing.
Ghosts are just not very substantial.