Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about stuff. Not the general meaning of stuff, as in: I’ve been thinking about stuff. But the more literal sense, as in stuff stuff: things, material possessions, articles we accumulate and drag through life like barnacles on the bottom of a boat. That’s the kind of stuff I’ve been thinking about.

I’ve purged many material items over the years, through the course of several major relocations and upheavals of circumstances. So I’m probably not at risk of suffering the accusation of being a hoarder. I was scared off early on by a relative who was most definitely a hoarder, though we didn’t really use that word when I was growing up. She was just “thrifty.”

Having survived the Great Depression, she couldn’t bring herself to throw away anything remotely reusable. She had a drawer full of old (used, of course) sand-wich bags stuffed full with strands of elastic salvaged from worn-out underwear. (I always thought that elastic is usually the first thing to go as underwear age, so the point of that was lost on me.) She also had bags full of little green twist ties and those plastic dealy-bobs used to keep bread bags closed. Under what occasion ten million of those plastic squares might actually be useful, I could not say— nor could she—but she still couldn’t bring herself to throw them out.

People who lived through the Depression era were actually traumatized. Stuff became scarce then, all kinds of stuff, from food to shoes and clothing, to money for medical care, and furniture. Terms like “making do” and “getting by” were mantras so ingrained in the culture of the time that what they stood for became the standard of living.

I may have been born too late to experience the Great Depression, first hand, but its influence left a heavy impression on people in my family who had a heavy presence in my own life, so it’s fair to say I was definitely affected.

I still have stuff from that era that was passed down to me—practical, useful stuff, even though it’s old. Enamel washpans, a handgeared egg beater, and a toaster cover made from flour sacking (I didn’t look too closely at the elastic around the bottom; some things are better left unknown.)

I like my old stuff. I like that there’s a history to it—that it was used by the people I knew and loved that have since passed away. I think of my grandmother every time I make bread or stir up a batch of cookies because the glazed crock bowl I use was hers. I can recall her work-worn hands reaching into that same bowl to mix up a meatloaf, or beat egg whites into meringue. I could buy a nice new mixing bowl, one that coordinates with the color of the tile backsplash in my kitchen, but I don’t want to think of cold tile when I’m cooking; I’d much rather remember my grandma.

Most people today seem to want the new stuff. But the new stuff doesn’t last like the old stuff. New stuff breaks too easily, so it will never survived more than a single generation. And I guess that’s the point. It gives people a reason to go out and buy more new stuff.

While I may not sit around ripping elastic from my old undies, I do have a different Depression throw-back behavior that’s almost a sort of sickness—nearly as ri-diculous as the inexplicable urge to save bread bag dealy-bobs. It’s this tendency to take things too far in the do-it-yourself (DIY) department.

Window shopping for me is not so much a leisurely pastime as a reconnaissance mission for drafting blueprints of stuff I can make myself for less than half the cost of purchasing the item already made—theoretically, anyway. Usually by the time I’ve driven around, scavenging the needed materials, bought the necessary tools and located the proper paraphernalia required for the job, I’ve already invested more time and energy and dollars than the thing was worth to begin with. But by-golly, I was raised believing in the value of handmade practical items that you knew how to fix because you’d built it yourself from scratch—literally. Items scratched up from junk piles and salvage lots and scrap heaps. Put together with old nails—pulled and straightened and saved in an old oil can—pounded into boards from the old corn crib that had to come down, but heaven forbid it get burned. There’s good lumber there.

It’s common today to see entire farmsteads dozed down and pushed into piles and burned to the ground. Someone’s dearly held dream and life of hard work reduced to ashes for a few extra rows of corn. Their stuff—kitchen stoves and milking stanchions and old wringer washers—buried, soon to be forgotten, like the people that first acquired the stuff.

I guess that’s the way of things. Nothing lasts forever, even the stuff we try to hold onto. Grandma’s mixing bowl won’t mean as much to anyone else.

Unless of course the day should come when I’m long gone, and one of my own daughters thinks of me as she stirs up a birthday cake in that old crock bowl, and re-members me telling the story of my grandmother using that same bowl in her kitchen on the farm when I was a little girl.

That’s the stuff that I hold onto and hope to pass on. Not so much the actual stuff itself, as the memories and meaning and history tied to it all.

You know, the important stuff.

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