Wednesday Walk: So Much Stuff

Grappling with our stuff and its afterlife, plus what I'm listening to right now

Welcome to Willoughby Hills!

Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…

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Packed Up

We are in the home stretch of vacating our old house and being fully moved in to our new one. It’s been a process several months in the making. Even as our old house feels increasingly emptier, there is still SO. MUCH. STUFF.

We recently rented a U-Haul to bring the last of the furniture that we’ve been using at the old house to our new one: beds, dressers, our couch, our dining table, things like that.

Our second 26’ U-Haul (Heath Racela)

We rented the largest truck that U-Haul offers, which is 26 feet long and somehow we managed to fill it to the gills. This is after renting another 26 foot truck back in April. 52 feet worth of stuff, and that doesn’t account for all the things that we’ve brought back and forth in our cars over the last three months.

Some things, sadly, didn’t make it and had to be trashed or recycled. In our old town, there was no curbside pickup, so all trash has to be hauled to a transfer station for disposal or recycling.

Over the weekend, I loaded the entire trunk and backseat of our minivan with garbage, scrap metal, cardboard, and wood and brought it to the transfer station.

Making a trash/recycling run (Heath Racela)

I’ve also been listing things for sale on Marketplace and donating things to thrift stores.

I just keep thinking about all of the time and effort it takes to get us things. Raw materials have to be taken from the earth and refined in some way. They are manufactured into a product. That product is boxed and shipped, often across the ocean. It is then trucked or railroaded (or both) across the continent to get to a retailer near me. People stock the shelves, people work the register. There are so many hands touching everything we buy, whether it’s a knick knack impulse buy at a dollar store or the latest iPhone.

I can’t help think about how capitalism is built around us working harder to earn more money to buy more stuff. And that system seems so very broken.

Even somebody like me who tries to be more conscious about consumption (or at least has for the last few years) is drowning in stuff.

I don’t know the answer to it, but moving and dying seem to be the two times in life when we are most acutely aware of just how much people own. Maybe we need a way to think more regularly about what we own and rethink consumption.

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Vintage Cup

As I’ve been contemplating our trash and what happens to things we discard, I came upon an interesting find at our new house over the weekend. I was pulling weeds in our front garden and started tugging on a vine that ran under the porch. As I pulled the vine, something came with it!

A vintage Burger King cup found under my porch (Heath Racela)

I stumbled upon a vintage Burger King styrofoam cup. Parts of it were missing, but I suspect that was more a function of something hitting it or an animal chewing on it than the styrofoam decomposing, as it was otherwise in very good shape.

I posted a video about the find on my Instagram and TikTok, guessing that it may have been a cup of coffee from a contractor working on the house when it was built in the late 1980s.

As far as I can tell, my suspicions were correct, as I was able to look up old Burger King logos and saw that this particular logo was in use from 1969-1994.

Burger King logos (1000logos.net)

It’s another reminder that none of the things we own and discard ever really go away, especially those items made from synthetics like foam, plastic, and polyester. Every coffee cup, toothbrush, ball point pen, and plastic straw is still out there somewhere, whether in a landfill or under somebody’s front porch.

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For Your Listening Pleasure

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the road lately, between driving moving trucks or just going back and forth between my old house and new house. Here’s some of what’s caught my ear lately:

• Real Organic Podcast: Episode #170 with Alice Waters: The Real Organic Project is a group that seeks to extend the definition of “organic” beyond the USDA definition, as industry lobbying has watered down the program over the years. In this podcast episode, they interview Berkeley chef Alice Waters (of Chez Panisse fame) about her new program to bring healthy, local food into schools. I was especially interested in how she brings her Montessori training into this program, looking at food as not only nourishment, but a chance to extend the curriculum.

• The Only Thing That Lasts: Get Rich Homesteading: Perhaps you heard my interview with Sarah Mock a few weeks ago about her new podcast for Ambrook Research. I’ve been enjoying it, but especially liked the most recent episode, which featured author Rebecca Clarren, who I also interviewed on my podcast. It was a fascinating conversation about the history of homesteading and worth a listen!

• Will Kimbrough, For the Life of Me: When I interviewed Will on my podcast at the height of the pandemic, he was performing concerts for neighbors on his front porch because touring had ceased. His latest album (his eighth studio album) is full of great songs. If you’re on the road this summer, take Will along with you!

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Other Wednesday Walks

One Less HoJo

Amazon is Watching

If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.

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