Stuff is the stuff that clutters our lives. We live with stuff that was somehow not stuff before but held a certain amount of value like the stuffed doll a boyfriend won for his girlfriend….then the stuff gets stuffed on to a shelf…pushing backwards onto the shelf another bit of stuff. The stuff then gets further stuffed as more stuff is given like the tea cozy mother made…which then adorns a statue on the coffee table which is already stuffed with stuff and piled with large picture books no one ever reads but which now serves as a stand for a cheap coffee cup stuff which states that someone is the world’s greatest dad…never mind that Dad has been dead for twelve years…that stuff is important. Then there is the stuff on beds…soft stuff and large stuffed toys that have to be stuffed under the bed each night in order to get room to sleep. Under the bed is stuffed with the two vacuum cleaners one of which works and the other is going to be fixed ‘soon’. Then that stuff has to be taken out from under the bed to be stuffed back on top of the bed in the morning in order to give room for the cat, her dead mouse and hair ball stuff.
Then there is the inevitable shelf which carooms around the top of the living and dining rooms, waiting for more stuff from more friends and in-laws who have had recent trips overseas: the coconut face which mocks a beautiful tree or a German walnut crusher with gaping jaw and broken handle. Soon the shelf is stuffed with more stuff; each one of a one-time-importance. Each one waits for an early grave but it is difficult to bury an old friend; better to let the stuff continue to stuff the stuff shelf. Soon, the shelf, crowded with stuff, becomes invisible and becomes the stuff décor in the house. The stuff is like living across from a house with a permanently clapped out truck, incapable of movement, eventually you do not even see it.
Of course there is the stuff in the kitchen. There are the thirty-nine unused shoes stuff which have become part of the decoration to the house entrance. Kitchen stuff exists in forms like penicillin-giving fungus on an old Danish blue cheese slab to broken whisks which are missing half of the bamboo bits but was part of mother’s kitchen stuff which ended up as stuff in my new kitchen. Because it was in mother’s kitchen, it cannot be abandoned. Four broken broom handles lean in the stuffed broom closet waiting for new heads. Then there is the machine stuff: two popcorn poppers, one of which works but always burns the popcorn, a mixer with all of the blades missing, a pasta maker that brother Charles said he would fix some five years ago and the diaspora of three moves from other houses and two partners who said they would be back one day to claim what they had to leave…and have never returned (Thank heaven!)
Then there is stuff from the garage. Oh gawd, the garage stuff! I counted 35 cans of paint in various sizes; fom the 10 litre container with one half missing and the rest a glued mass to three cans of black paint; and there is NOTHING around that calls for black paint. The cans now hold down the tattered blue canvas tarps stuff that are used to cover the boat and all of its stuff. The boat was sold six years ago. The other cans of paint wait to be finally used to match the twelve house room colours long abandoned and painted over. There is paint brushes stuff which are glued to the sides of paint pots and as hard as any stuff can get; more like lumps of amber stuff. Then there is the sulphuric acid stuff in dangerously thin plastic containers. That stuff should really be taken off the top shelf. Tomorrow. I have been told that only terrorists use sulphuric acid nowadays. The local rubbish tip will not even take it. Broken tools abound. Machines with missing parts and stuff wait for their resurrection day and all three hand-pushed lawn mowers, all with either a missing wheel or handle, need sharpening but no one knows how to sharpen them now. ‘We don’t do that sort of stuff anymore’, the small motors man recently stated.
Tommorow…or the week after…I am going to hire one of those big iron tips, the ones that are carried on a large flat-bed truck, and put every bit of useless Stuff in it I can lay hold to and have them whisk it away; then I can sell my house and buy a smaller place. However, I will need a large garage for the stuff that I know will sneak in under the doors and into the closets. That divesting of my Stuff will be the day of Ultimate Forgiveness.
However, stuff has its own life.
Or: I could have the ultimate revenge; will all the Stuff in my house to the kids who conjured up most of this stuff anyhow, and just go fishing. Which I will!
If I can only find my fishing stuff under all this junk!
