A History of Our Stuff

I cleaned out our store-room yesterday. Well, it's not really a store-room; it's more like a "store-corner" - a little enclave underneath our neighbour's stairs just outside our front entrance. Because it has a door, I suppose it earns the right to be called a room, despite its size or lack thereof.

Given that this store-room is under the stairs, you can imagine how the room slopes so that at the farthest point, the roof is less than 30cm from the ground. When you have accumulated as much stuff as we have over the years, it becomes more and more of a challenge to be able to fit things in. It was precisely this point that I was pondering as I repeatedly accidentally bumped my head against the sloping ceiling. I got to thinking about the history of our stuff and I came up with this fascinating timeline.

1996: Leah and I announce our engagement. You are all so generous and give us gifts, which I stored in my small bedroom.

Late 1996: Leah and I announce our forthcoming wedding. Once again, we are showered with gifts. My room begins to fill with boxes and I joke that I'm building the Great-Wall-of-Presents, which is the only visible man-made structure you can see from the doorway of my room.

January 1997: Leah and I get married and we move in to our small rented flat on Alma Road. We buy small items of furniture to make our place feel more homely. Slowly we get rid of the boxes that we found ourselves using as the coffee table and such. We also acquire more stuff for the house, as one would.

October 1997: Our first child is born. Gifts and baby stuff abound. Cots, change-tables, toys etc suddenly appear. We now officially have more stuff than we did before.

Between 1998 and 2003 we moved 3 times, each time schlepping the boxes we brought from our Alma Road flat, some we never opened again.

In 2003 we made aliyah. We purged our house of the excesses. We got rid of junk. We gave away furniture we just couldn't fit into the lift.

We arrive at our home in Ramat Beit Shemesh and we don't have any of our stuff yet. It is stuck on a boat somewhere in the middle of some expansive ocean. Our home is blissfully sparse. Three months later our lift arrives and we have stuff again. Glorious stuff. Wonderful stuff. We unpack and cull even more: why did we bother to bring this with us? What were we thinking when we packed that thing? Now we have more stuff than before, but less stuff than we expected.

In 2005 we start packing for our move to our new home in Ramat Beit Shemesh. As we pack, we find stuff to give away to charities and the like. We get rid of the contents of boxes we packed in Alma Road that we still have not opened. When we move in to our new home and start to unpack, we find even more stuff that we don't need. Stuff.

Then comes last night when I find myself crawling in the crevices between the boxes in our store-room, picking out stuff to get rid of. I am happy to report that we now have a more modest and manageable amount of stuff.

If you are reading this in the distant future, say past the year 2200, you now have a historical record of our stuff. If you can find room, please put this blog in your museum along with all the other stuff.