Dumpsters of Memories

“Three Dumpsters full”, my mom sighed as we began the tedious journey home from my grandparents’ house in New York. We had been there for a week, which was longer than we had planned; all we had intended to do was clear out their garage, perhaps look at some old photo albums and laugh at my mother’s haircut or my uncle’s horrifying fashion sense. However, we had sorely underestimated the amount of items they had accumulated over the years. They had a two-story garage, which (unbeknownst to anyone, even my grandparents) harbored thousands of things: useless trinkets, dated toys, decrepit pieces of furniture, mold-ridden books. My mother stared in horror as she watched my grandma write the check for not one, not two, but three rental Dumpsters, which were packed to the brim with the material goods. These evidently had at one time been important enough to pack away and store “for the future”, but now nearly all of them were on their way to a landfill. Elizabeth Morris’s The Tyranny of Things describes this process of accumulation and clearing out, which made me think of nothing more than my grandparents’ old garage. I was just eight years old at the time, so I can remember being fascinated by the amount of items they had collected. In a corner of the garage, I stumbled upon a yogurt-maker from the 1980’s; later on, I stopped my mother from tossing it into the Dumpster. Appalled, I asked her why she would throw away something so useful. She laughed, and said “Apparently, it wasn’t very useful if it was sitting here for twenty years.” Her logic didn’t make sense to me; I could only see the different types of yogurt I could make on my own. I yanked it from her hands and took it straight to my suitcase. Ironically, I now have no idea where that yogurt maker resides; if I had to guess, it has most likely found a home in a garbage heap. Material goods play a vastly important part in our lives, and this is because we envision a better life with them. A girl