Essay

The war on stuff

By Kit Pancoast Nagamura

The combat against stuff seems unending. I'm referring here to the kind of stuff that invades your home under the operation code name "clutter." You can fight the onslaught, but it's a tough war to win.

Here's how it goes. First, dust and cobwebs bivouac behind your sofa or in corners, serving as a diversionary tactic. While you're battling them, bills, junk mail and magazines penetrate your lines of defense, snaking under the door or commandeering your mailbox. Next, empty hangers, widowed socks, pencil stubs and constipated pens camouflage themselves and then secretly multiply; one day you realize they have colonized your closets and desk. In the kitchen, jars of ossified spices and out-of-date foodstuffs hide like land mines, and jars of biological weapons lurk in the rear of the refrigerator. The list goes on.

Most of us rally periodically and beat back the front lines of stuff. Careful sweeps and daily reconnaissance missions help, as do containment strategies.

But history proves some ranks of stuff employ sneaky stratagems to achieve permanent occupation of your home territory. Just try to eradicate photos, letters, souvenirs, broken tools, too-tight clothing, holiday decorations, gifts from great aunts, et cetera. A single photo can lay waste to your entire campaign, transporting you backward through time to a summer decades ago, by that beautiful lake. And the key chain from Hawaii? It can hypnotize you into an AWOL daydream of vacations gone by. Letters are the worst, though, infiltrating nearly all your senses and emotions, taking you down memory lanes that do not lead to victory over clutter.

This summer, my son and I flew to my mom's battleground of stuff, hoping to provide outside reinforcements. We were as successful as most such "mercy missionaries": well-intentioned, but naive.

We started in my mom's art studio, too cluttered to be functional. We swept up cobwebs, dust and even lizard eggs. Then I started on the stuff: "Can I toss these crumbling pastels?" "No! They're still good." "How about these petrified brushes?" "I think we can still use them." "How about this frying pan of hardened wax?" "That's for batik!"

I began to worry. Finally, I won a skirmish with a defunct computer and its tortilla-sized floppy disks. "Someone will be thrilled," my mom prophesized morosely as we set it on the trash pile, but I celebrated this minor conquest.

All too soon, though, we were derailed by works of art my mother and her artist friends had created over the years. Next, we were taken prisoner by blueprints my father had drawn for gardens and buildings during his lifetime. Then, we died with laughter over Polaroids of me in my first bikini and my son's scathing commentary.

In that cool studio, redolent with the smells of inks and film developer, surrounded by the afternoon shadows of palms, we completely surrendered to stuff. We lost the war, but not all was forfeit. Queen Elizabeth I of England, one of the world's most powerful and intelligent rulers, once said, "All my possessions for a single moment." Luckily, we found our moments in amongst those possessions.

Shukan ST: August 19, 2011

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