Last January fires devastated communities in the Los Angeles area. My daughter Molly lives five blocks from where the recommended evacuation area was. Besides the threat of flames, toxic smoke hung heavy in her neighborhood. Molly and her roommate fled to a friend’s apartment in a safer part of the city. In tears, she described how tormented she was having to choose a few possessions to save from potential loss. She took things that had been her late father’s: jackets from movies he’d worked on like the blue satiny Superman bomber with his name embroidered over the heart.
I barely remember feeling that sense of preciousness about things. I’m at the stage of life when caring about objects fades daily. And yet, I’ve never had so many possessions. Don’t get me wrong – I would hate to lose my house and what is in it but where I am ultimately headed, there’s nothing I can take. This is my time for downsizing and I’m not being great at that. It is mostly my laziness that prevents me from purging, whittling down my life to lessen the future clean out for my daughter.
But it’s also my awareness that my daughter wants to hang onto things. I recently mentioned to her that I was exasperated with my younger self for shipping two large sculptures from Japan that I’d carved. They are too heavy for me to lift alone. Titled ‘Relic’ and ‘Seed’, they sit – giant dust collectors in the corner of my living room, barely visible behind the television and plants.
“They are my inheritance,” Molly says.
Her future headache, I think. Even if I could move them, I would not bother to save my well traveled sculptures from the threat of flames. In fact, perhaps that’s what I should do with them. I’m sure this well seasoned camphor wood from Kyoto would burn nicely in my wood stove.
Letting go of possessions can be difficult for some of us. When I was in my late twenties to early thirties, I rented a room in a house by the beach in Connecticut. I escaped from the city on weekends to my sweet space on the third floor. The house was owned by Tom who became a beloved friend. He was in his 80s by the time I moved into his rambling home overflowing with a lifetime of memories. Many of the rooms of the house were unusable because they were so full of things. There were boxes and boxes of Tom’s belongings, his deceased mother’s and other long-gone family. The 5 or so of us who lived there as ‘roomers’ had clear spaces. Almost in reaction to Tom, our rooms were sparsely furnished and neat. The kitchen too, was always clean and organized although Tom was known to eat expired sandwich meat.
We all became friends and regularly gathered in the cluttered but manageable front room for cocktail hour with Tom as our generous host. He’d offer drinks to all, make himself a martini and always had plenty of Molson’s and wine on hand. We’d find space on the couch and other perches around the room, filling it with laughter. Sometimes Tom would crank up the player-piano from the adjoining living room – too full of boxes and treasures to sit in. Living there was casual and easy, the evenings of warmth and friendship sustained us as did Tom’s love. We became an oddball little family and barely noticed the clutter around us. His home was an oasis. I loved it there.
While not as much as Tom, I have my own lifetime of stuff – the value of which is primarily sentimental. A thief who looked in my window would pass on making the effort to break in. No fancy sound system, jewels or likely valuables in this house, they might easily assess. Only memories. Nothing to steal here.