Photo by Gina Easley

By Jody Mace

I started hating things in the first week of December, 2012. I mean “things” literally. Objects. It might have been the tiny plastic cocktail forks that did me in.

Before that week, I had an archaeologist-like fascination with things. I was especially interested in things that other people had discarded. I’d walk down the aisles of thrift shops and consider the objects on the shelves. I rarely bought anything. There was the brass table lamp with the straw lampshade, crystals hanging, like coconuts, from the palm leaves, above the monkey family. But for the most part, I left things behind.

I took pictures of some of the more interesting finds and even put them on a website for a while. I liked to think about the people who owned the objects and why they let them go. The flotsam and jetsam of our lives. The clock picture frame with a picture of a boy next to each number, year by year. Each hour, his face lengthens, and his hair grows darker as he grows from a baby to a pre-teen. How could anybody throw that away?

I especially enjoyed the notebooks, a voyeur’s paradise. There was one in particular from a girl, maybe in middle school or high school. She was not a go-getter.

Page 1:

To Do

Page 2:

Storie: A girl walked down the road.

Page 3:

Dear Journal,

I need a break from school. I don’t even want to go.

Page 4:

My mom said

Page 5:

(A tic-tac-toe game that ended in a tie.)

The notebook was a monument to her inability to get it done. She was rudderless. But the new year brought a burst of energy and determination.

Page 6:

January 1, 2001

Take shower

Make bed

Get $ 4 yearbook and field trip

Eat baggle

Get dressed

Do hair

Pack purse

Get dirrections 4 math project

I thought about the girl and wondered about all that happened to her after she wrote in those pages of the notebook. Was her January first to-do list a sign that she was getting herself together? Or did she drift through her adolescence? What was she doing now? Would she remember her young self if she saw that notebook now?

Then there were the objects—so many objects—that made me wonder why they were created at all. The leering Santa knick-knacks. The figurine of a clown riding an elephant, carrying a clock, balanced on a ball. The little ceramic shoe, filled with little ceramic mice.

In late 2012 my father moved from Florida up to North Carolina. He had early stage Alzheimer’s, although he hadn’t been diagnosed yet and was years from admitting it. I had somehow convinced him to move up here so we could keep an eye on him. When he moved, he brought everything.

Everything.

There wasn’t room for everything in his new apartment but he was overwhelmed with the task of downsizing, so the job fell to me and my husband Stan. We had to decide what to keep, what to donate, what to dump, what to store, what to beg my siblings to take.

A small sampling of the things my dad shipped from Florida:

• One and a half bottles of vodka
• A zip-loc bag of coins, mostly pennies
• Approximately twelve phones
• A box of ShamWow super absorbent towels
• 26 yarmulkes, so he’d be prepared, I guess, to lead all the area Jews in morning services
• 8 hard drives
• A cherub corkscrew. The screw part was actually the cherub’s penis. (When I commented that it was an interesting corkscrew, he explained the operation of a corkscrew, as if my comment was about its functionality: “You just screw it in and then pull it out.”)
• Multiple funnels
• The contents of his kitchen junk drawer. The shipping box was actually labeled “Misc Junk Drawer,” which is one of the most terrifying things to read on a box you’re about to open up.
• Part of an old garbage disposal
• An almost empty plastic bag of napkins
• A package of approximately one hundred chopsticks
• Really, really long tweezers
• A glass bowl filled with plastic cocktail forks

It was during this process that I developed a distaste for all of his things, and things in general. I stopped enjoying thrift stores. I rarely shopped at all. The things we already owned started to seem oppressive to me.

I had always been able to turn a blind eye to chaos in my home. But after digging through the piles of my dad’s junk, my own junk started to make me tense. It was harder to ignore all of our own stuff.

Plus, I had a new understanding that our possessions would someday be a burden to our children, who were, at that time, in high school and college.

I can be pretty fatalistic. It would not surprise me at any point if I were to die in a car wreck or from a sudden, catastrophic illness, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I think it’s possible, maybe probable, that I will trip over one of my dogs on the stairs.

If that happens to both me and Stan, then our kids would have to sift through the wreckage and decide what to keep and what to dump.

I had started reading about the Swedish tradition of döstädning, which is translated as “Death Cleaning” or, more satisfyingly, “Death Purge.” The idea is to simplify your life by getting rid of a lot of clutter so that you minimize the labor, both physical and emotional, of your children when they need to figure out what to do with your possessions after you die.

So we rented a dumpster.

We got the biggest one we could, twelve cubic yards, from a local junk removal company. They parked the dumpster in our driveway, and then, after five days, would haul it away and sort through everything, separating the contents to recycle, donate, or reuse.

It’s strange to think that all your possessions are just material. Wood, metal, plastic, paper. A wooden carving of an owl is really no different from a table. The Bible is pretty much the same thing as that girl’s notebook at Goodwill.

Speaking of paper, I worried about my own papers of any kind ending up at a thrift store for someone like me to gawk at. So I shredded them. The sheer quantity of papers broke my shredder, so I threw the shredder in the dumpster too, and bought a new shredder.

I fantasized about an almost empty house, with minimal items on shelves, all with a specific purpose.

We had a lot of junk in the house, so the Death Purge started out easy. There was plenty of low-hanging fruit. Worn-out shoes, a broken printer, old WiFi routers, four navigation systems, mismatched table wear, the unfavored coffee cups. The exercise bike which had never worked, that Stan had brought home triumphantly six months earlier from a dumpster.

But at some point the decisions get harder. For us it was after approximately six cubic yards of crap.

There are three categories of things that were hard to get rid of: aspirational items, items that “might be useful someday,” and items that reminded me of a specific person.

Aspirational items had a shelf life. I had no problem getting rid of the huge block of wax and the package of wicks from the time when my son was around twelve and I thought we would, obviously, make candles. Also, I threw away cheesecloth, from when I mistook myself for someone who might make cheese. But last summer I bought some little vials of essential oils from which I was going to concoct natural bug-repellant, according to a recipe I found on the internet. Since that aspiration was less than a year old, I kept those. Because you never know.

Letting go of aspirational items was an admission that I hadn’t achieved a goal, even a goal I didn’t remember having. It was admitting failure. Coming to terms with some of these little failures and throwing away the evidence was freeing.

In the category of “might be useful” were a lot of surprisingly specialized kitchen implements. A French fry slicer (a grid made of wire that you presumably pull down on the potato), an apple corer-peeler, a melon baller, a straw spoon. These all went in the dumpster. Although I had always sliced cheese with a plain old knife, I actually owned a cheese slicer that promised to produce thin, uniform slices of cheese. I decided to keep it and also decided to stop decluttering at that very moment and slice some cheese. At the first attempt, the wire popped off. It had been junk all those years but I had never known it.

One thing that I did keep was the vegetable spiralizer, which I had just bought. I made a point of spiralizing three zucchinis that day. Because this was different.

Stan and I didn’t always agree on the future usefulness of items, but we deferred to the person who wanted to keep them. Which is why, after the Purge, we still had a rewired vintage x-ray machine and a coffin in the garage. They were part of the Halloween haunts that he had created for several years, and, that, he said, he might again.

Souvenirs were really easy for me to dump. The shelf life of my attachment to wooden shoes from Amsterdam or German beer stein mugs was short. Looking at them didn’t help me remember the time I spent in those places. They were just stuff to buy.

We say “flotsam and jetsam” when we talk about the objects we unload. But in the nautical world, flotsam and jetsam are two different kinds of debris. Flotsam is the stuff that goes overboard as a result of a shipwreck or accident. It’s lost, through no choice of the owner. Jetsam is stuff the owner throws overboard on purpose, maybe to lighten the load.

I had looked at the stuff at thrift stores at flotsam. What tragedy could have caused sentimental objects to end up at a thrift store? A sudden death, a mismarked box during a move? But I was starting to think that this stuff had actually been jetsam, thrown overboard to keep from sinking.

I found a cassette tape with a label written in my mother’s hand. It had the name of a relative who I had never known. I learned from a cousin that he was the brother of my maternal grandfather. My grandfather had died when my mother was a child. This was just the kind of thing that shouldn’t be thrown away.

I put the tape into a cassette player (that miraculously hadn’t ended up in the dumpster) to listen to this oral history. I never knew my grandfather, and my mother died twenty-two years ago. I’ve always wanted some kind of connection to the world I didn’t know, a little window into my mother’s childhood.

The tape began.

“We did well with mutual funds until the crash of 1962…then I went into the real estate field but that wasn’t for me…Alan said ‘then just take a second mortgage on it’…we had a carport on one side of the house…I spent some time at the country club, but Mother never really went…”

It was the most boring thing I’ve ever heard.

Just like aspirational items, sentimental items have a shelf life too, and a small circle of interest. My great uncle’s children might do anything to hear his voice again, but to me, it was a stranger talking about things I didn’t care about. The only thing that mattered to me about that tape was his name, written in my mother’s distinctive, elegant handwriting, so tall and precise.

I could not let go of anything with a connection to my mother, although I was starting to feel like I was missing the point of the Swedish Death Purge.

I put her collection of cookbooks into a box to carry to the dumpster, but then took them out and lined them up on a bookshelf. It wasn’t even nostalgia about childhood meals that made me hold onto the cookbooks. I didn’t remember her cooking anything from them. Cooking wasn’t her strength. Our meals were mostly meat, with a side of canned vegetables. The cookbooks were aspirational for her.

For some families, food traditions connect one generation to the next. For my family, food aspirations connect us. It was a parade through the decades of unmade recipes.

The Halibut Soufflé from Casseroles, including Breads (1952.) The Eggs à la bordelaise from Larousse Gastronomique (1961.) The Vichyssoise from Cooking with Wine (1962.) The breaded veal steak and sweet and sour tongue from The Kosher Gourmet (1974.) In 1994 I grabbed the baton and didn’t cook the Soba Noodle salad in Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home.

I was caught short by the remnants of my kids’ childhoods. We found a bunch of sticks in my son’s old backpack. The sticks were carved into sharp points. The shanks of suburban boys. They were from when he was around eleven, during the time he spent entire afternoons in the woods with other boys, creating elaborate civilizations. They used bark as currency and built shelters out of branches. They formed alliances and waged war. Really, I had no clear idea of what they did in the woods, because it was none of my business.

But when I looked at those sticks I could see him at eleven, thinking of nothing but whittling, his focus as sharp as the points. I kept the sticks.

I also kept the tomes that his sister wrote. The travel journals, the business plans, the letters of complaints about her brother.

I admired my friends who matter-of-factly dumped the bulk of vestiges of their kids’ childhoods, but I didn’t understand them. “Each kid got one Rubbermaid tub to hold their stuff!” they declared.

It all made sense, but, on the other hand, it would be hard to fit six full-size LEGO ships, the collection of ceramic horses, and the six-foot-long stuffed tiger into a bin.

There’s no logic to keeping any of this, I know. And it’s embarrassingly sentimental. But I’m not ready to let it go. Also, I can’t stand to think of it in the dumpster, mixed in with the stuff I don’t care about, being sorted through.

To the recycler, fabric is fabric, whether it’s a shirt from Target or my mother’s last pocketbook. Paper is paper, whether it’s an old newspaper or my daughter’s notes about her secret club. And wood is wood, whether it’s those souvenir shoes from Amsterdam or my son’s carved sticks. It’s all flotsam and jetsam.

But when those materials are what connects me to the past, it’s not so simple. Throwing them overboard doesn’t make my load lighter. It just makes me lost. Maybe that fabric is the sail. Maybe the paper is the map. And that wood? What if it’s the boat?

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her website is jodymace.com. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

Read more FGP essays by Jody Mace.