Room to breathe

I have a lot of stuff I have collected through the years. I also have a lot of stuff that has been collected by members of my family through the years. I often complain how I have three people's worth of stuff, yet it seems it is more than that.

I have this collection of maps. Some of the maps are of places I have been to, and will probably go again. Others are those that my mother collected, of far off places she never saw that I will most likely never get to. In this day of electronic mapping, I wonder if I even need to keep these maps. Maps are comfortable, intriguing items to unfold and to look at and imagine the journeys I could embark on. Otherwise they just take up space. Space I need. But I am reluctant to recycle them, to get rid of them. I like that they are there. And I am tortured by them taking up space.

I don't want to take up the space opened up by one thing being thrown out with another thing. I just want the space. I want the breathing room. A long time ago I moved into an apartment by myself with just a few pieces of furniture, my kitchen stuff, my sound studio stuff and my cat. I had room to dance in my apartment and space to look into and to meditate on. I slowly collected things to fill in those spaces along the walls, on the bookshelves, in the closet. I added weight to my life with every addition.

Now I live in the house that was once my mother's house. I am slowly blending her things with mine. My brother's things, being mine now, are also in the mix. And then there are those items that had belonged to my sister. All of us, Mom, Mike and myself, held on to those things that were Kate's. So now I have four people's worth of stuff. All of these items have very little value to me other than they once belonged to someone who was once here and now is gone. They attach little emotional weights on my heart that make it so very hard to look at them as just objects. They seem to say to me, "Keep me. I will remind you of her," as if I am not always reminded of my lost ones.

There is a simple round red tin can with a funny lid that has an attached pry lever to open it. This was brought back from Missouri by my sister Kate. She only willingly showed me what was inside it once. She had collected a bunch of downy feathers from some fowl living on the farm where my Aunt Clare had lived, and put them in the can. I suppose the can was only there to protect the fragile feathers. That trip to Missouri was over 30 years ago. I have that can with its feathers and have brought it with me from place to place. It sits on a shelf with some other stuff. I am hesitant to let go of it. It tells a story of the kind of thing that enticed Kate's imagination and interest. And though Kate has been gone for so long now, 29 years this May, when I open the can there is a fresh memory of her.

There is also the regular stuff people hang on to. A record collection for that day when I get a record player hooked up to my stereo, dishes, books, (oh my, there are a lot of books!), and photographs of four generations of the Connors and Tague families. It is a huge challenge to cull through all of this stuff. To pare it down to bare essentials is a colossal feat that when I begin to think about doing it my brain just stops. I get distracted by the smallest thing, and I try to think of how to just rearrange everything so it fits. But so that it fits with room to breathe.

Ultimately I have to let go of a lot of these things. And though I wish to have more things that once belonged to my father's family, such as his mother's oriental carpets that were once in the house I grew up in and the china cabinet that my Dad moved from Boston to Homestead so that I could have it, I long for a time when I can put all of my stuff in a small storage space and bolt off to some far off place I have only seen on a map in my mother's collection.