Pack rat genetics, or stories through stuff

We moved in January, and since then I’ve come face-to-face with what, I think, is my genetic destiny: I must, without fail, save every. single. thing. I’m not Hoarders worthy, but still. It’s RIDICULOUS.

For example:

I’m working in that chair. On that desk, next to those shelves stacked with stuff freshly unpacked from dozens of boxes. You can see just a few of the, oh, 65 Nancy Drew books saved from my childhood. I have stacks of slides, old wooden stamps from my dad’s business, dozens of arrowheads collected from all over North Carolina. Jars of buttons my mother collected maybe 25 years ago. Notebooks filled with school reports and stories I wrote in school.

And these boxes? Office supplies, journals from elementary school on, letters from high school friends, files of notes from stories written five years ago, one marked “IDEAS,” which I haven’t even opened yet.

I’m a child of parents who grew up during the Depression. They saved everything. I mean everything. When my sister and I cleaned out the house after my dad passed away, we threw away cabinets full of jarred peaches and green beans that were, oh, at least 15 years old. At least. We filled a dumpster full of things my parents had squirreled away in the nooks an crannies of their house. It’s hard to watch your parents hard work (even work that had spoiled) tossed into the garbage. I took what I could.

My physical connection to my parents is through the stuff they’ve left behind. For Iver, it’s all she’ll know. The arrowheads. The metals from Senior Olympics. The slides and the scraps of paper with their handwriting. The horse show trophy from the 1957 North Davidson Easter Festival Horse Show. The “if you haven’t used it/worn it/read it/looked at it in a year, then it’s not that important and should be shed” advice doesn’t work on me.

I know. This is weird. Melodramatic, maybe. It’s hard for me to let this stuff go.

But we have to make room for Iver, while also sharing with her half of who she came from, right? How do I do that? I’m trying to figure it out.

And so the boxes are sitting. Have been sitting, in fact. I’m working around them, trying to make headway on ever-growing lists of things I need to do. Like try not to be a pack rat. Or something like that.