Being Stuck With My Mother’s Stuff: Pandemic Clean-Up Post 1

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about my mother’s stuff before – I could effortlessly write a whole book about my mother’s stuff, truth be told. She is one of those annoying women who keeps everything; who places a priceless value on each item she owns (and which she has dubbed, her ‘treasures’), from little notes my sister and I wrote to her as children, to every single card we ever gave her, to her collection of rocks, her collection of doilies, her collection of linen table cloths, her baskets, my Grammy’s sewing scissors (that no longer work), a whole bunch of carved wooden acorns (?), a unique lamp that is pretty but is no longer safe to plug in (vintage 1949), old cassettes I can no longer play but suspect include the voices of now-diseased loved ones.

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The Unbearable Heaviness of ‘Stuff’

The collection of ‘stuff’ has been an ongoing theme in my life, and it all started with my mother. A baby born at the end of the Great Depression, Mom was a collector of everything. Born into an extremely poor rural French Catholic family, she had to leave home at age 15 to get a job and to make a way for herself in the world. Education was (and is) a luxury that the poor could simply not afford.