You Can’t Have Everything, Where Will You Put It?

Ah, the sweet sound of children bitterly recriminating each other over April Fool pranks gone awry. A charming way to begin the day.

What is the history of April Fool? Never mind, I don’t really want to know.

And no, I have no announcements to make. I’m not pregnant. I haven’t accepted God’s dubious call to run a marathon. I’m not about to take a new and exciting job in Mozambique. I have no funny prank whatsoever to offer up to whatever god is being appeased on the first of April.

In fact, no joke, I’ll be back in the laundry today, systematically dealing with boxes of clothes and trying to throw away so so so so many things.

Two days ago I most passionately defended the owning of stuff, if that’s what you want and like to do. But really, balanced against the right to own stuff should be the right to throw it all away.

Yesterday I drove my three well children to NJ to say goodbye, one last time, to my Great Aunt’s house and…stuff…by bringing some of it home with me. I really miss my Aunt Kathryn. As I’ve said before, her being there, in Annandale, made me being here, in Binghamton, make sense. I’m not from here. I’m from the West, and other worlds entirely, and this Eastern life with the low rolling hills, and the close set towns and villages still feels foreign. But Aunt Kathryn was a stopping point, in the journeying from one part of the world to another, from my earliest childhood moments, and so I put a frame around living in Binghamton that I was living “near family”.

Aunt Kathryn grew up in the Depression era, the child of missionaries, a tough tough lady. She earned an MD long ago when there were no other women around her doing that kind of work at all. She owned her own medical practice. She eventually worked for AT&T in the glory days when companies hired their own doctors. Her generosity for the gospel kept missionaries alive and eating across the whole world. And very often she would come up here to Binghamton and buy us the whole contents of Wegmans, which richness we always thoroughly enjoyed.

But like so many of her generation, who suddenly had the power to buy, she never was possessed of the power to throw anything away, anything at all. And so, when she died, her house was full to overflowing of stuff, and she was confined to her chair, a space on her own bed, and a pathway to the kitchen. A life so broad and generous and far reaching narrowed itself to the point of not being able to see out of the windows to the vista of the bright New Jersey woods outside.

I came away from her house, and a lovely visit with her daughter, my…which kind of cousin (my mother will have to align the generations for me), bearing a car full of stuff that Aunt Kathryn had carefully collected, and that my own children thought we definitely should have. A small China cat figurine for each child, lots of nice tea cups, a really glorious green milk pitcher, boxes and boxes of pictures and papers, a whole bin of knitted items which will be lovingly distributed by me around the country and world to all my relations who I know will be most happy to receive them (I have orange, green, Everything, ya’ll), and also a really fine bookshelf.

My children wanted to take it all. They have no idea of the peril that lurks behind the accumulation of interesting “Stuff”. I kept saying “No” and “where will we put it”, “what is it for”, “what will you do with it”, and myriad other questions intended to narrow the scope of what we would walk away with.

I came home, remembering my own comfortable moments in that house, moments that never included seeing all of the rooms, moments that were guaranteed to leave me with a stubbed toe and a feeling of sadness, prepared to throw away absolutely everything I own. A great urge to hire myself a dumpster and fill it with all my own things is still sitting in my throat. We don’t Need Anything. We can’t take it with us. We should just rid ourselves of its burden now, before it’s too late.

This is our cultural heritage, we Americans who have endured both deprivation and prosperity. It makes sense that we would look to someone outside of the confines of our culture to tell us what to do with our stuff. What is it for? Where should we put it? And, importantly for me with my own children, how should I help them deal with the tidal way of consumables that fill up their Easter baskets, Christmas stockings, and other unplanned moments like going to Shepherd’s Bowl to eat food and coming home with bags of weird looking China dolls from a garage sale that some nice person “thought all the kids would love”.

“Those are so interesting!” I cry, and when the children wander a way I shove them in a bag and hurry desperately to Salvation Army, or even the dumpster, or anywhere where they will never be seen again by me. Life is too short. Soon I might die. I must not waste minutes worrying about twenty creepy China dolls cluttering up my life.

And so I swing wildly back and forth, just like everybody else, trying to deal with the stuff, and trying to be grateful for the people, and trying to keep my eyes fixed on Jesus, whose generosity for the gospel sent him into the world to feed us, clothe us, and keep us alive forever.

[Me in the room that I never before saw. It was so beautiful and plain and open and bright.]