Inheritance (Stuff, revisited)

My sister and I are blaming our ‘stuff-keeping’ behavior on our maternal grandmother. She was the original Environmentalist and always reused, repurposed, recycled, or restored what she had rather than get rid of it. (Not that, in our case, we are actually using all this stuff that we have – we seem to just keep it all tucked away somewhere. Not quite the spirit of the thing, but there you have it.) My husband claims to have had a grandmother just like mine. It’s possible. They would have come into their own, so to speak, during the Great Depression. Since my sister and I have no such excuse, we are just claiming to have patterned after them. It’s our Inheritance.

I don’t think Grandma’s house was cluttered though. I suspect she didn’t acquire new stuff at the rate we do these days. But there are certainly things in my house reminiscent of her and her own collection of ‘stuff.’ I always admired her china cabinet filled with pretty things. While the memory of the specifics is probably faulty, the overall impression – crystal salt dishes, miniature tea sets, china cups – sure sticks and I’ve wanted one like it as long as I can remember. So now I do have a china cabinet myself, filled with just those kinds of things. It's getting full though. I can't bear to part with anything in it...

I also keep a glass jar for pretzels on my kitchen counter in her honor - since that was her habit too. (And so that I can eat pretzels more readily, of course…) And I have her berry bucket – which I used to pick blueberries during all those years in Alaska. That is stuff that I’ll never part with, no matter how cluttered things get.

Instead of ‘stuff-keeping,’ I’d have liked to inherit her kindness, her humor, her quick and sharp intellect, her patience and her charity. I know my mother got those ‘genes’ in abundance – along with the 'collecting stuff' one of course. Maybe it was a 'clustered inheritance' and there is hope for the other qualities too.

Certainly the jury’s still out on the rest of the ‘cluster’ for now. If we're eventually remembered for those things, we’ll credit them to Grandma. But I'm afraid that today, at least, we are just blaming her for our Excess Stuff.

That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.