Stuff and Other Nonsense

It seems like everywhere I look these days, whether it's the newspaper, TV shows, the AARP magazine or whatever, someone tells me that I should “down-size and simplify”.  As far as I can tell what these people are really saying is that, when a person reaches a certain age, he should get rid of all his stuff.  Not just the obsolete stuff, oh no.  The objective here seems to be to move out of your roomy, comfortable house and move into some little box with no storage and get rid of all your past history in the process.  Well, I say a big “pthuupfth!” to that.

It has taken me a heck of a long time to accumulate all my stuff and I'm damned if I'm going to give it up.  I say, keep that house, even if there are only one or two of you living in it these days; and, as long as you have a place to store it, keep your stuff too.  You fought long and hard for all that junk and you deserve to enjoy it, even if you haven't pulled it out of the attic in fifteen years.  In fact, if you don't have room to store all your stuff, do as I do and recycle it.

I have to confess that I actually have down-sized and got rid of some stuff over the last decode or so.  When my wife and I lived on a few acres in the country I was in hillbilly heaven.  I had lots of stuff stashed all over that little piece of pastoral paradise.  As a matter of fact, we moved onto a place where somebody had already put some stuff by in anticipation of our arrival.  When we began to explore the property after we moved in we discovered that one of the previous owners had abandoned a car and a pickup truck in the ravine behind the near hayfield.  Instant spare parts!  How can you beat that?  A little further along the ravine was sort of a dump spot where I found a set of old box springs.  Just the thing to use to smooth the acre-and-a-half veggie garden after I had tilled it.  I just dragged it behind the riding mower and it worked like a charm.

That's really the crux of what I'm getting at here.  You can recycle and re-purpose almost anything and get some use out of it.  The way I see it, that beats dumping it in the landfill or donating it to Goodwill or some other place that will sell it for a profit to somebody more creative who will get that usage.  Of course, sometimes it isn't clear up front what something can be used for.  You have to sort of look for the hidden use the way a wood carver looks for the shape inside a chunk of oak. 

For example, when our daughter and son-in-law got married we inherited our daughter's bedroom suite, which she had taken with her when she moved out of our house and no longer wanted.  We didn't really need another bedroom suite, but we did need an armoire for the guest room.  So I removed a few drawers and sawed out the supports and “Viola!”, we had an armoire.  Let's see one of those simplifiers do that!

I'm not sure where my attitude about hanging onto stuff comes from.  I do come from a long line of hillbilly tinkerers, though, and I'm sure that has something to do with it.  I was also into the “back to the land”, “grow your own”, “make it do, use it up, wear it out” thing back in the 60's and 70's and I suppose a lot of that has stuck with me into my dotage.

Gardening has given me a lot of re-purposing and re-use opportunities.  I had one of those happen just this week. 

 About six months ago I was offered a slew of bricks if I would just haul them away from my next-door neighbor's backyard.  So I made a zillion trips with the garden cart and hauled thebricks over to our backyard with vague notions of building a walk with them.  To date that hasn't happened but this week my wife noticed that some of the fingerling potatoes we had bought last week had begun to sprout. 

So she asked her private master gardener to plant them so we could grow our own.  The problem was that we have a really small veggie garden bed and I had already made plans for it.  What to do?  As I was pondering that question my eye fell on that big old stack of bricks.  So I used them to construct a planter for the potatoes that will let me pull a couple of bricks out of the side every so often to harvest a few spuds without disturbing the whole bed.  Couldn't do that if I wasn't a pack rat.  OK, I could, but I would have had to spend a lot of money I don't have and, if we had down-sized to a condo or something, I wouldn't have had a place to build the doggone thing.

I do a lot of container gardening.  That is a re-purposer's dream.  I have planted flowers, herbs and veggies in an old barbecue smoker, roasting pans, tires, wash tubs, cookie jars, pots, pans and about any other thing you can think of that will hold dirt and plants.  The plants in the low, circular planter in the picture above are in the water pan of an old smoker.  Usually my old girl doesn't complain about the things I use as planters.  In fact, she has begun to get into the act.  The wagon planter in the picture below was her idea. 

We did have a battle of wills a while back over an old toilet that I replaced a couple of years ago.  It sat in the garage for over a year until my wife finally convinced me that it wouldn't fit in with the rest of the garden decor.  So I guess there are some things that can't be re-used.  You never know, though.  So “pthuupfth!” to down-sizing.  I”m staying put and keeping my stuff.