This post began just as a reflection on my years of accumulation and disposal—what I’ve needed, wasted, thrown out, lost, missed, kept, still need to deal with. A followup to my musings on the privilege of voluntary simplicity, now I guess it’s the woe-is-me dilemma of so much stuff.
Tonight and for the next week or so it will be unusually cold in Austin, a string of nights and even some days below freezing and even single digits, wintry mix—something I’d only once before experienced in all my years here. That time, during an ice storm, the schools closed for two days. My son and I bundled up and walked over to the frozen pond near our house, then came home to the fireplace. This time I’m tucked in, cozy, laundry going, while a room away, at my desk in my minimalist nest, the luxury of writing. Plus some work chores.
Just a mile away, and farther out, are the unhoused communities of Austin. Everywhere here now, crammed under freeways, lining downtown streets and gentrified places, along the shore of the recreation-destination Lady Bird Lake. It is shocking. Even if there were enough shelter space here, for now the communal living would make its residents exceptionally at risk in the pandemic. I’m not sure I could have made it through the night, or the next several nights, in the tent towns under I-35 or Ben White, along Cesar Chavez, or below the Lamar Street bridge that we runners and walkers and cyclists and canines casually use to gather on and cross the lake. We don’t even let our pets stay outside in conditions like this.
Mattresses and sleeping bags and blankets on concrete. Scattered broken bicycles. Clothing tossed in grocery carts and hanging on fences. Camp stoves. Survival comes first. But I can’t help but compare how the (relatively few) things I brought to Texas, and those I acquired here, are so carefully taken care of—because I can, and only because I’m among the lucky ones with that choice.
I returned to Austin suddenly in March of last year and quickly emptied a house in Illinois. There was no time for prolonged careful planning. Some of my things got shipped. Some came in my luggage. Most went into storage.
Storage units—as as I’ve now learned—are sad steel boxes, but also the mongrel of necessity, memory, opportunity, and sometimes disrupted lives. And they charge a lot of money.
Years ago, I drove back to Austin from a meeting in San Antonio with the then-executive director of the think tank we worked for. We clucked a little at the multitude of storage buildings along I-35. Both of us comfortably employed, housed, and fed, we judged them as the spawn of a consumer culture generating too much stuff that people had to pay to keep after they’d paid to buy in the first place. I’m sorry that I didn’t then recognize those storage buildings as waste, sure, perhaps, but also as the last place for some people not to lose things they might really need, and which hold meaning for them. Some of those people won’t be able to pay the monthly fees and then there will be auctions.
I don’t anymore need much of what I’ve stored and hope that in giving it away, it still might be useful to someone. Habitat for Humanity Restore and Jane Addams bookshop, I’m coming for you in the spring. The clocks and stained glass and handmade furniture made by my Dad, the quilts and needlework made by my Mom, the piano I bought as a child with an inheritance from my grandmother, my artwork, my vintage Miyata bike, bins of Lego blocks and Brio train sets—they’ll stay. Paying storage fees for those things feels like a luxury.
Dayna Finet 