Three Thousand Pounds of Stuff

Registering for wedding gifts was, I suppose, my first induction into the American cult of stuff. We were getting married in three months, and there would be people who wanted to give us gifts. Thus, we began the incredibly self-centered process of picking out gifts that others would pay for, piece by piece. I remember walking through the aisles of Target with a Star-Trek scanner, pointing and clicking possess anything in the store. Did we want a turkey deep fryer? An electric towel warmer? How about a silver-plated crumb sweeper set? We wandered up and down in an ecstasy of investigation, searching for items that we would use for the next fifty years. Our choices tended towards the mundane—sheet sets, coffeepot, and Tupperware—leaving the more exotic choices for trendier couples. Craig and I are both the pragmatic sort, and only disagreed when our ideas of usefulness differed.

“No, I don’t want to register for it! What is it?” puzzled Craig, holding up what looked like a large, flat duffel bag.

“It’s a casserole dish warmer. You zip the covered dish up into the insulated liner, and it stays warm if you need to take it somewhere,” I explained brightly, raising my eyebrows and nodding genially to model my approval of this useful household staple. My laser scanner was poised and ready to add this handy item to our growing list.

“When do we ever go places with hot food?” he reasoned.

“We don’t, now, but it will be different when we are married, silly. We’ll have dinners to attend, I guess,” I bravely justified, but could tell I was losing.

“My mother never had one,” Craig boasted, and it was like wind coming back into my sails. No matter what either set of our ancestors had to struggle without, I wanted my own life, conveniently appointed with my own stuff that I picked out. We registered for the insulated casserole dish warmer, and today it graces the bottom shelf of my kitchen cabinets, recovering from the one time in our married life it was trotted out to transport a pan of steaming Hawaiian rice six blocks.

Packing box after box in my kitchen in early June, pausing occasionally to adjust positions and give my broken foot a rest, I questioned a few zaps of that scanner. We have many things that are useful but unused. We have a countertop rice cooker that Craig swears we need to use someday, but I roll my eyes and say it’s easier to make a pot of rice on the stove. Our Foreman Grill, so popular among the lean, mean grilling set, started gathering dust when high cholesterol made us stop eating beef. Nevertheless, these and many other things we don’t really use were packed up to accompany us to our new life.

It’s great to have stuff, but the soon to be moving see their stuff differently. Every piece of furniture became useful according to the probability that we would use it in the future. Our townhouse rental had one living room, so one of our couches would have to go. Moving our twenty-year-old refrigerator 2,500 miles would cost way more than it was worth, so we planned to leave it behind. What others could use went to a charity (thankfully one that had free removal), but our garbage can was full for weeks. As I prepared to leave my job, I went through my accumulation of work related things and realized that I didn’t want to take any of it with me. I started giving things out like an April Santa Claus, hoping that others could benefit. For a year before we moved, I found it hard to accept gifts that were not consumable, imagining the growing mountain of our possessions that already needed to be packed. Even browsing the spring clearance sales seemed foolish; nothing was cheap if it had to be packed in a new box and shipped.

When the cross-country movers came, our jaws dropped as we saw a full-size semi truck back its way through our small side street. This was where all our stuff was going. A crew of three loaded everything like a jigsaw puzzle into the front fourth of the truck, fitting large pieces on the bottom to make a foundation for boxes in the middle and bicycles on top. Even though we had mercilessly pared our furniture down to the essentials, we still had plenty of stuff to move.

As the crew hefted our massive oak dresser down the narrow hall, one grunted “You know, pine is a nice, light wood, and you can stain it to look like oak. People can’t tell the difference.”

“Yes, I know,” I giggled back. Sitting in a fifty-year-old chair that once belonged to Craig’s grandfather, I pretended not to close my eyes in hope that the walls would be left intact. One of our first married acquisitions was a solid oak bedroom set. I think my five-years-ago self needed a symbol of permanence and stability in the wake of so many changes. Odysseus and Penelope’s marriage bed was carved from a giant stump still rooted to the ground. I wanted something almost as solid to testify to us putting down roots. Now we had chosen a different path, but solid oak bedroom sets can be uprooted, too.

When the movers were done, I stared at our accumulation of things, which now resembled a giant sugar cube. Stranger still, this room-sized distillation of our life would be driven to Utah to share truck space with another couple’s granite tabletops and crated curio cabinets. Together our separate lives would make the journey to Kentucky, or so we hoped.

“So, which level of protection do you want to add to your moving order?” I was asked as I signed the bill of loading. It turns out that moving companies make quite a bit of their money insuring people’s stuff. If something happens to an item, or even the entire truckload of one’s worldly goods, the companies limit their liability by making people sign consent to accept sixty cents per pound in return for a botched move. I paused, imagining a supermarket scale and a bulk price value. I didn’t like the thought of treating everything I’ve ever owned like broccoli. To avoid this fate, I was expected to pay a few more hundred dollars to upgrade to a high deductible replacement plan, or even more money for the company to replace anything damaged. For good measure, the head of the moving crew told stories about moving mishaps. One poor family’s crate was dropped 200 feet off a barge, reducing their furniture to matchsticks and infusing their clothes with jagged splinters. Another woman drove to her new home. Glancing back at the truck in her rearview mirror, she was just in time to see the hydraulic lifts on the moving truck fail, leaving it stranded on the railroad tracks in the path of an oncoming train. Her stuff was blown high into the air and spread evenly over thousands of square feet.

“I’ll take my chances with the sixty cents per pound,” I said uncertainly. It seemed a little shady to pay a large company extra NOT to damage my stuff, and our homeowner’s insurance protected goods in transit. I was much happier with the idea of paying someone ELSE to insure my stuff, who would then have recourse against the company if anything happened.

One of my favorite moving pictures was of me perched on the front seat of the moving semi, balancing my boot brace on the doorframe and reaching up to pull the whistle. After the camera clicked, I was perfectly happy to climb down and let the crew manage to drive the monstrous vehicle. Our Chevy Malibu was packed full, but at least it could turn sharp corners.

The truck made the drive in nine days, pulling up in front of our Lexington townhouse on a Monday morning. We were waiting and ready to watch them unload, but the first thing they did was spend two hours on the phone. Since neither of our employers wanted to foot the bill for our move, we paid by check, which is apparently not often done. Our movers would not unload until they received confirmation that our check had cleared, which is hard to do at nine a.m. eastern time when everyone on the west coast is still in bed.

I felt immense relief as I watched the movers wheel familiar things into our new dwelling. It was almost like receiving everything all over again. Every lamp, table, bookcase, and box was recognized and rejoiced over as we placed furniture and stacked boxes on the floor. I harbored a secret fear that we would be the one in a million whose truck would be pushed over a guardrail by pieces of a falling satellite, scattering debris over a desolate canyon, never to be seen again. My mom remembered this feeling as she reflected on the interstate move that brought our family to California when I was six years old. “After all, it’s just stuff. It’s important to hold it loosely,” she rightly said.

The best thing about moving to a new house is the rebirth of every item into a new life. We have a small oak cabinet that has been a microwave center, a media stand, and a bookcase, but is now a nightstand. The shelving that organized sweaters in our master bedroom closet now holds Craig’s books in his basement study. Now that we’ve bought a house and moved again in Lexington, we’ve experienced that renewal twice in four months. The Winnie the Pooh print that Craig bought me at Disneyland on our first anniversary went from the spare bedroom to the kitchen to the master bedroom as we moved houses. Even the small recorder that taped missed lectures when I was in college now records Craig’s field notes when he gathers information for his research. Finding it years after I thought I’d thrown it away was like receiving it new. I wonder if that would work with other things lying around our house. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go hide the rice cooker.