STUFF

Have you noticed all the articles showing up on Facebook lately, warning we Boomers that our grown kids really don't want all of that stuff we've spent so many years accumulating? I especially liked the cartoon where an older gentleman rolls up the door on his rented storage space, which is packed to the brim, and tells his son "Someday this will all be yours!" The father is beaming with pride, but the son looks absolutely horrified!

It got me to thinkin' about all that "stuff". The kind so many people spend their lives accumulating, working to pay for, arranging, sorting, and protecting. My mom was a great collector of stuff -- to the point that it was the most important thing in her life. It was her identity, her claim to fame, her biggest accomplishment. Without it, she was a nobody. Which might explain why she was so dead-set against getting rid of any of it when she got older.  Eighty-some-odd years old, and never dressed or left the house except for doctors appointments, but she wasn't about to part with even one of her almost 100 pairs of shoes -- and their matching purses! These pictures below are from the final purge. The one that came after the one where we moved them out of their house, and the one where we moved them out of my sister's big house and into her smaller house, and the one after Dad died and we moved Mom into assisted living, and the one after she moved from assisted living to the nursing home.

This was all so odd to me, since all I want in the world is to be free of all this clutter. I really don't want to be remembered for my stuff. I just want to be remembered for all the fun adventures I shared with the people I cared most about. I feel confident that my kiddos, my hubby, my Muses and my lifelong besties have a pretty good store of those memories built up, so my main goal now is to create as many as I can with my grandkids, in whatever time I have left.

'Cause you just never know, do you, when that time will be up?