OK, OK, maybe my problem isn’t so severe that I need to attend a conference, but something tells me that I should probably add "yet" to that statement.
I’ve finally finished my move from Springfield back to my hometown, Alton. During the two-hour drive home, I couldn’t help but think about the heavy, overstuffed boxes that my four closest friends and I had just hauled out of my second-floor apartment. It wasn’t until I started going through my belongings that I realized some of those boxes hadn’t been opened since I left Carbondale two years ago.
I’m only 24 years old. How have I accumulated so much?
I know I’m not alone here. How much “stuff” do we keep in our apartments and cars that we never use? It sounds cliché, but when I peek into my grandmother’s garage, where I just unloaded all of my boxes and crates, I can’t help but wonder who might be able better use for those items. If I were into psychology and such, I could easily trace this back pretty far. This practice of keeping everything “just in case,” is definitely a learned behavior and one that has been well-honed in my family for years.
I’ve heard of this being a hold over from the Great Depression, when people had to be creative with the money they had and the few items they owned. My maternal great-grandparents worked in an Illinois factory that produced 15 billion rounds of ammunition during World War II. Later, my great-grandfather delivered furniture and picked up construction jobs when he could. My grandfather worked as a schoolteacher. In my own family, my father’s blue-collar job was our only source of income growing up -- something that rarely happens these days.
These humble roots demanded our family’s long history of hoarding, and it has served us well. I remember watching my mother quite literally save pennies to help us to go on vacations, which yielded great memories that we were able to share together.
But in my own life, I think something has gotten lost in translation. I seem to live on two extremes -- hoarding and wasting.
On the one hand, I have been known to wear clothes until they are nearly thread-bare and am an unabashed fan of Saturday morning yard sales. (Unless the yard sale is run by a one-armed man on the north side of Springfield who tries to sell me his kids as a bonus for the knick knacks I’m perusing…. But that’s an entirely different story.)
Yet I also discovered that I have four packs of partially used AA batteries, two boxes of untouched Christmas lights, seven bottles of shampoo and a dozen cans of assorted vegetables and fruits. I know… Somewhere things got a little off track.
Over the next four days, I am going to sift through each box to determine what will stay in my grandmother’s basement for the next two years and what will end up on the yard sale table. I’d like to think that the people who snatch up all of these goodies will need them, but I’m worried they are going to end up in the home of another hoarder.
From everything I’ve read, the country I’m heading to is frugal -- a stark difference compared to the U.S. even during a recession. In one of my pre-training documents, one volunteer wrote about a playground scuffle among boys that came to an abrupt halt when one of the fighters got dirt on his pants. Also, the Peace Corps has cautions us future volunteers about bringing too many shoes because many people there have one, maybe two, pairs. I just brought home two boxes of shoes.
U.S. materialism is nothing new and I’m not going to stand on my soapbox about it now, but it will be refreshing to be in a country that hoards with purpose, rather than the aimless pursuit of amassing vast quantities of unnecessary … stuff.
