The Things We Own, Discard, Bequeath
One rainy afternoon this past summer, I lounged on a couch with a book. The couch in question was comfortable, and I had been surprised to find myself on it regularly. We had not had a couch in our apartment in New York; there had barely been room for a table, three chairs (two wooden, one upholstered), two dressers, a bed, and (in the narrow hall by the door) some bookshelves. I had my cello in an upright case, but there was not enough space to play it. Now, in this apartment in Cologne, the rain pattered against a wall of windows as I lounged on the couch which belonged to a woman I’d met exactly once, when my husband and I had come to pick up the key and survey the congregation of plants we would be caring for while she went on vacation.
I knew how to take care of this woman’s plants because I had seen all of them before; I’d grown several in New York and killed several others. That a woman in Germany I’d only met once had the same plants I had raised in Manhattan struck me as a generational, Instagram- and perhaps even pandemic-related coincidence. Clearly this woman and I were in the same demographic. We had absorbed the same better-your-life-through-plants memo. But while I had been able to carefully select my plants, this woman had been able to carefully select everything. Not a single thing, not the hand soap in her bathroom, not the bowls in her kitchen, not even the kitchen chairs, seemed to have been a matter of chance or circumstance. Her overall aesthetic—the fact that she even had a cohesive interior design vision was baffling to me—was mid-century modern, with a touch of millennial pastels from hand-thrown ceramics and plastic foldable storage boxes. Not one table or chair was outside the bounds of that style: not one mug mass-produced, not one storage box a primary color. Every single item in this woman’s home was lovingly, attentively, specifically chosen. Well, everything except my stuff.
I had packed for what I expected to be one and a half seasons in Germany: summer and the start of fall. I had not realized that German summer might as well be called Late October. I had been wearing the same sad knits all at once for weeks. Carefully chosen my clothes were not. My husband knew the weather and had planned accordingly. What’s more, he had inhaled Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, perhaps the only book I’ve ever recommended to him that he’s finished. The items in his suitcase were not only seasonally appropriate, but beautifully folded into MUJI luggage compartmentalizers. Everything had a place and everything had a purpose. He and his stuff fit perfectly into the perfect, plant-sitting apartment.
I had taken a very different approach to Kondo’s mantra of “Does it spark joy?” Kondo does say that “we should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of,” so if something brought me joy, I bought it. And then I’d buy more, for more joy. This excess was somewhat modest: houseplants, perfume, notebooks, pencils, books, and secondhand ceramics. Perfume took the most justification, but the passion had been professional for one year when I worked at a niche perfume shop in Brooklyn. Books took the least justification; though I love the odd find and early editions, I generally buy books according to my reading and writing interests, for what I consider to be a working library.
Once, wandering into a Housing Works on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I’d found a ceramic mug with a little frog inside, just like the mug my grandmother had used to serve milk to my brothers and me when we were little. I immediately bought it and sent a screenshot to my brothers. “Buy them all!” one wrote back. “There is only one!” I replied. “Nah, they’re just limiting the release of the mugs to prevent a mad rush,” said my other brother. But if there had been more mugs, I’d have bought them all.
Though I wrote while plant-sitting, I genuinely missed writing with wooden pencils: the satisfaction of using up a whole pencil is part of how I reach word count goals. I’d packed mechanical pencils, figuring that would save suitcase space, but when I got desperate enough to look in stores, I was astounded to discover that the box of pencils, as a thing, does not exist in Germany. You can buy individual Staedtler pencils at a stationer’s, you can buy a pack of three pencils packaged in plastic at a post office, but the beautiful paper boxes of Kitaboshi pencils that I love to write with are virtually nonexistent here. For my birthday, my brother shipped me the last two boxes of my Blackwing subscription. I was overjoyed, and also very satisfied that I had evidently been hoarding all of these pencils with a subconscious premonition of the lack of pencil boxes in Germany. The satisfaction I felt from collecting was perfectly articulated by British writer Deborah Levy, who I was reading at the time: “I was collecting things for a parallel life, or a life not yet lived, a life that was waiting to be made. In a way, these objects resembled the early drafts of a novel.” The practical, smooth-leaded pencils represented the type of writer I could be, the kind who wears down a pencil in a matter of hours. My greater collection of pencils was with the rest of our belongings in a container in a shipyard in Brooklyn; I imagined my new, parallel life would start once they arrived. And I wondered, as I sat there taking in the very chosen-ness of the items in the plant-sitting apartment in Germany, what kind of a life I was living in the interim, with a suitcase full of the wrong stuff. What did it mean that I missed my frog mug, that I missed my pencils—so much so that I was actually upset, and began reading to distract myself.
The book I was reading was Things I Don’t Want to Know, which Deborah Levy begins by explaining that one spring, anytime she went up an elevator, she found herself crying. So she took herself to Mallorca. One evening there, she claims a table for three all for herself and orders a bottle of wine from the miffed waitress. A shopkeeper who recognizes her joins her at her table and asks if she is a writer. In response, she tells him her life story. What follows in the book is a version of that story. I was hooked. I inhaled the entire trilogy.
Levy tells you about the very difficult parts of her life as if you were sitting in her kitchen with a bottomless bottle of wine and she was cooking you dinner, a scene which seems to play often across the books. Throughout her difficult life, Levy repeatedly acquires stuff that comes to have personal significance. She dresses her bed in silk sheets; she stocks up on a specific citrus soap; she asks her daughters for an ice cream maker so that she can replicate a recipe she tasted in Mumbai. Levy does not acquire for quantity, nor necessarily for quality, but always for meaning: each specific thing that she chooses leads her to ask, “What do we value (though it might not be societally valued), what might we own, discard and bequeath?” This question frames the third and final book, but Levy builds up to it throughout, as she charts a path toward valuing herself. The very act of valuing, she seems to suggest, has value. And valuing yourself seems to relate to valuing your things.
“Why are you rereading those books?” my husband asked some weeks later, when we were in a different apartment, full of more stuff that was not ours.
“I’m rereading them,” I declared, “for instructions on life.”
The great late George Carlin had joked that “That’s the whole meaning of life… trying to find a place for your stuff.” I don’t disagree, and neither, it seems, does Levy. She phrases it differently than Carlin, but the components of their philosophies are essentially the same: stuff plus place equals life. Like me, Levy was looking for the ideal home in which to lead her ideal life. Meanwhile, she was living in a dreary apartment building and trying to make ends meet, asking herself “what was I going to do with all this wanting?” Though making ends meet is the bane of my existence, unlike Deborah Levy, I did not have a dreary flat from which to imagine the real estate that would enable me to have the writing life I wanted. I had no apartment, did not even have my stuff. What was I going to do with all this wanting?
What I was going to do was sign a sublease. As of September, my husband and I had a flat in Cologne. Sort of.
“I didn’t want to wake up and be sixty,” said the woman who sublet us the Cologne apartment she had lovingly furnished with her husband. She meant she didn’t want to wake up at 60 and not have moved to the island they were moving to, where they would run the business they had just purchased.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said, having not wanted to wake up and be 60 in that tiny (though lovely) apartment in Manhattan. Hell, I had not wanted to wake up and be 40 in that apartment. Who wants to live in a box for so long that she is surprised every time she is able to enjoy a couch?
But this Major Character, as Levy might have called her, was not so interested in my back chapters; she was too preoccupied with finding a place to put her (and her husband’s) stuff on that island. In the meantime, we could sublet the apartment and use all of their stuff, as long as we used everything carefully. Like the plant lady, this couple had conscientiously chosen the stuff in their home. Unlike the plant lady, they wanted us to know that each and every item came with a story. There was the plant one had given the other when a parent died; that was the chair each sat on when sneaking the cigarettes they were both trying to give up; those were the books that they had decided to keep in duplicate when they combined their libraries. We were essentially moving into their personal history. Our personal history was in a container ship crossing the Atlantic. After two months of hopping around different quarters of the city, staying in various apartments, I was just excited to be able to take the stuff out of my suitcase and put it on their shelves.
One of the things I took out of my suitcase was Annie Ernaux’s The Years, which a friend had warned would infiltrate my thoughts at random moments and stop me in my tracks on the street. The Years did not affect me in the same way it had my friend. Instead, what surprised me, probably because I was fixated on my own stuff, was the attention Ernaux paid to stuff—the objects that came into and out of her life in a sort of flood of ever-increasing consumption.
The voice of the memoir morphs from singular to plural and back, speaking both for Ernaux and her entire generation, born during the Second World War. The first chapter hints at what will be gone when this generation dies, then goes back to the start of their collective life to recount their experience in a chronological fashion. Ernaux’s childhood was poverty-stricken. The two preceding generations had essentially survived nonstop war with only a brief intermission. I recommended The Years to my mother-in-law, who is the same generation as Ernaux, and she told me that her generation took whatever they were given: they could only say yes, because to say no would be ungrateful, even unwise. Ernaux recounts this mentality of holding onto stuff in meticulous detail, from the scarcity illustrated by the pots and pans her family reused through the world wars to the relative abundance of things such as Bic pens and shampoo that they began to buy afterwards. One early list of purchases goes on for nearly three pages. Three pages full of stuff.
I could relate to Ernaux’s enchantment with “the abundance and novelty of things” because my own youth took place during the emergence of mall culture, in what felt like the compounding commercialism of the late 20th century. Of particular resonance was the astonishment Ernaux felt looking at all of the “places where merchandise was displayed… reborn each morning with the splendor and abundance of the first day in Eden.” I still remember feeling like a trespasser when I stepped into the Gap as a kid. According to my mother, it was where people with money bought their clothes; she once yelled at me that she drove a school bus just so I could have clothes from the Gap. The handful of items I received from that store over the course of my child and teen years remain embedded in my memory, each item with its own story. I think of them almost like people I used to know. I miss them.
The Edenic appeal of buying stuff did not start with Ernaux’s generation and won’t end with mine. In the 19th century, the advent of the department store contributed to the shift in the public conception of shopping. What was once a chore became a pastime; what was once an errand became an event, a site of socialization, a stage on which class identity was performed. Middle-class Western women went to department stores to visit with friends, to eat at restaurants, to gape at beautiful window displays, to see and be seen, and of course, to shop. In his introduction to Emile Zola’s 1883 novel The Ladies’ Paradise, scholar Brian Nelson writes that the department store “shows women emerging more and more into the public spaces of the city. It functioned in the same way that the Church had previously done, by providing women with a haven outside the home, in which to sit, think, and find solace.” Shopping, or consumerism, came to define the middle-class Western woman 140 years ago, and never went away.
If purchasing is a performance and consuming a pleasure, how did these newly invented “shoppers” feel about their stuff after they brought it home? For Ernaux, the accumulation of stuff is what makes her feel guilty about leaving her “place,” the class in which she grew up: as a young wife, Ernaux purchases a fondue set her parents do not understand or appreciate when they come over for dinner. Education is her elevator from the lower to the upper-middle class, but each new level is marked by new and different stuff, and like Levy on her literal elevator, Ernaux cries as she goes up. Each acquisition subtracts something: video results in the loss of “spontaneity,” the Walkman severs the mind from reality, and even her education represents “intellectual gentrification.” As Karl Marx put it: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Even something as seemingly simple as a Walkman has metaphysical implications for Ernaux; she is not proud of her resulting isolation, either from her physical world or from the socioeconomic class in which she was born.
A 2022 study published by the National Library of Medicine suggests that people who “place greater importance on acquiring material goods … report lower levels of personal well-being, spanning across components such as lower life satisfaction, higher levels of depression and anxiety, and a lower sense of purpose in life.” While Ernaux’s impoverished childhood forced her to focus on material goods, she does not have a particularly materialist mindset, especially once she reaches a more economically secure adulthood. In fact, Ernaux describes her generation as “high and mighty despisers of consumer society” who hypocritically consume clothing from places like Zara in pursuit of “a little shot of extra being.” But if life is nasty, brutish and short, to borrow a phrase: why should consumption come with so much shame?
What is really going on in The Years is that Ernaux sees stuff as a debit, a deletion, a minus in an ever-lengthening tally of life-via-accumulation. Ernaux is so far from being a materialist, she’s closer to a spiritualist: rejecting not just overconsumption but the material world altogether. Like the eighth-century Christians who forbade their followers from being buried with their possessions, Ernaux sees the objects of this world as a distraction from the greater meaning, rather than a part of it. Ernaux’s perspective put me on the defensive. I feel very protective of the kid I once was, intimidated by my mother and the Gap, but there’s more to it than that. I love my stuff. Love. And by Ernaux’s definition, stuff is at best stupid. Among all of the stuff that Ernaux lists in The Years, there is not a single thing that she describes with what Marie Kondo would call joy.
In mid-September, our container ship arrived in Rotterdam, and I thought my longing for my stuff would soon be relieved. Customs, it turns out, is rarely a quick process. My diary entries from this time read like a love affair; the tension and anticipation were overwhelming. The week before the delivery, the Major Character had arranged for her brother and some friends to pick up her two couches and whatever else could fit in the truck they’d brought; the freed space only heightened my longing for what would soon fill it. The day of the delivery, in late October, I could barely eat. We filled the living room with our boxes, which spilled over into the hall and kitchen. We had to organize trails so that we could get through all of the stuff, like hoarders do.
What I had thought was the goal was only the beginning: I was surrounded by the things that I loved, but they were stuffed into boxes and I could not reach them. My husband built bookshelves so that we could at least unpack the books in twenty-eight of our eighty-seven boxes. The kitchen was full of the Major Character’s stuff, so I couldn’t take our plates and bowls and pots and pans out—where would I put them? Ditto for my clothes, though I did rummage through the labyrinth to find at least one box of warmer sweaters and shirts and pants I could wash and wear. It was at this point that my gratitude for having a place to live that was full of stuff we could use began to sour. Looking at the Major Character’s pictures on the walls only reminded me that I could not unpack ours. She and her husband would return to Cologne in late November, and until then I was stuck staring at my boxes.
Pausing from filling another diary or two with my angst, I sliced open the tape on several boxes just to see what was inside, to touch my own things. A larger box full of wrapped, framed pictures yielded the familiar shape of a frame that I just had to unwrap: a print from my grandmother.
My paternal grandmother—she of the ceramic frog mug—was eight years younger than my grandfather, and as his health took a frightening turn for the worse in the aughts, he became hellbent on purging all of their possessions before he died. They were living in an assisted living facility called “Freedom’s Village,” a painful name, given that everyone there seemed to be waiting to die. My grandfather took his blood pressure three times a day and shuffled about with a walker, cautiously putting stuff against the wall by the door to be thrown out or donated.
During one of his shuffling episodes, Grandmom and I sat over coffee in the living area. She pointed behind her to a framed print of an elegant woman astride a snowy peacock, a reproduction of a 1918 cover of Vogue, which was still hanging on the wall.
“You better take that before he gets rid of it,” she said.
The print itself had originally belonged to my great-grandfather’s mistress: there’s no other way to put it. My great-grandparents had married after the chaperone of their first and only date insisted that an impropriety had occurred. I don’t know exactly what happened, but the subsequent marriage was not a happy one. Divorce wasn’t an option, and so my great-grandfather made sure that his late-in-life mistress, a Midwestern woman named Alice, had accommodations near his own house on the Jersey Shore.
That was where I met her. My grandparents’ beach bungalow was mid-century modern: I still have the wooden stool from the kitchen bar where Alice perched, dressed head to toe in purple, her blonde wig askew. I couldn’t have been more than ten. She turned to ask me if I liked horses, then didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t offer a coherent response. Alice was already on a swift descent into dementia. That brief interaction was the only one I ever had with her.
More than a dozen years have passed since my grandmother died, but I can still see her pointing to the print. I can still hear the pride in her voice as she told me that Alice got to see the world. The print, in black-and-white with a teal background, is objectively beautiful. But more than that, it is a piece of my relationship with my grandmother and a reminder of what she valued. She wanted a piece of the woman she’d taken care of, the woman who had willingly broken with convention, to stay within our family.
Where better to hang it than in the apartment that was not-quite-ours, on the other side of the Atlantic? As I sit drafting this essay, the poster hangs on the wall to the left of my desk. Whenever I look at it, I’m reminded of this whole weird, complex family history. What I do know about Alice seems to highlight what I do not know about Alice. Most of all, though, the print is a reminder of the closeness I shared with my grandmother. Looking at it is not the same as looking at any other identical Vogue poster. Even if the magazine printed thousands of these, even if Vogue itself perpetrates a culture of copycat consumption, my poster is singular. It has a specific story.
“Desire,” critic Andrea Long Chu said, “involves cutting a lot of things out of the world, so that you can imagine a space where your object is going to give you a thing that you want it to give you… Desire has to be a process of subtraction.” Desire is exhausting, particularly when whatever you have imagined will “give you a thing that you want it to give you” does not deliver. Then you have to eliminate it, unless, like your education, you simply cannot. Sometimes the thing that has not given you what you thought you wanted (a perfect life, for example) has given you something else. Such as the tools with which to examine the life that you actually have.
But what about desire and subtraction for a writer? Ernaux longs to reject stuff, yet writes about it to the point of obsession in her books. Writers build worlds, and in doing so, both Levy and Ernaux must b concerned with stuff. As critic A.S. Byatt wrote about Iris Murdoch:
Murdoch wrote in her wise book on Sartre that he had “an impatience, which is fatal to a novelist proper, with the stuff of human life.” Her own desire to make a world in which consciousnesses were incarnate, embedded in the stuff of things, might seem to derive from George Eliot, who wrote movingly of her wish to make pictures, not diagrams, to “make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate.”
Writers must pay attention to stuff because stuff forms the texture of life. Consciousness can be “embedded” in things, and you need such embodied, ensouled things to create a living, breathing world in a story. I think of Grady Tripp’s old writing robe in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys; I think of Marie Kondo telling us to thank our old items before donating or throwing them out; I think of The Velveteen Rabbit. Who could ever forget that rabbit, an object loved into existence?
All of the stuff in The Years is devoid of such love. Stuff is without consciousness. Perhaps this is the pitfall of writing about an entire generation: you list all the stuff that makes up the texture, and then blame the surface for the fact that there wasn’t much beneath it. Deborah Levy’s relationship to stuff is completely different from Ernaux’s, partly because she is writing only about her personal relationship to stuff. Though she comes from a younger generation than Ernaux, the difference between them strikes me as more than the difference between being in one’s 80s, anticipating death and being in one’s 60s, anticipating one’s 80s. Instead, these two writers hold two entirely different world views embodied by stuff. Levy sees technology as part of her path to trekking up the hill in Mallorca: typing machines that grow less and less cumbersome to carry to her desk. Ernaux sees each machine as an embarrassment, if not an absolute deletion of some other more precious way of life. Meanwhile, at the close of The Cost of Living, Levy reminds us that her book was written on her laptop, because stuff, a laptop, is real. It is what makes reality.
At the end of Real Estate, Levy writes that “my books are my real estate. They are not private property. There are no fierce dogs or security guards at the gate and there are no signs forbidding anyone to dive, splash, kiss, fail, feel fury or fear or be tender or tearful, to fall in love with the wrong person, go mad, become famous or play on the grass.” In other words, Levy’s desire to write books, to use stuff to make more stuff, is a process of generation, not subtraction.
Ultimately, I do not think Ernaux is absolute in her desire to subtract. She, like Levy, has a desire to bequeath. The final line of The Years reads: “Save something from the time where we will never be again.” Even Annie Ernaux wants to keep something, even if she cannot say what, exactly, must be kept.
“Did you ever notice,” George Carlin asks, “when you go to somebody else’s house, you never feel 100% quite at home? You know why? No room for your stuff!” As November arrived, hanging Alice’s print on the wall was not yet an option, so instead I stared with increasing defensiveness at what was hung on the walls. One painting was a sort of collage with a Warhol Campbell’s soup can. It was not an actual Warhol, but who else is famous for painting soup cans? I was not happy to see a reproduction of a reproduction of a Campbell’s soup can hanging on the wall. Just when I thought I had left America, there was Americana—or an approximation of it—staring at me from the wall. I wanted my actual stuff from America. My stuff, I told myself, could not be replicated. That’s why I liked it so much.
Andy Warhol liked a lot of stuff. “Pop art,” he said, “is liking things.” According to scholar Jonathan Flatley, Warhol made an art of liking. Whenever he liked something, he collected it. In this way, Warhol might also be classified as a collector of collections. He not only collected ceramics and a wide array of physical objects, but he was also an obsessive documenter of his daily life. Boxes contain the receipts and notes that passed through his hands day by day; tapes contain recordings of what he heard in his Factory; photographs from the camera permanently on his person preserve what he saw; and my personal favorite: he even collected perfume. He’d wear a perfume for about three months before putting it into his collection to designate the history of those three months; to smell it again was to smell that specific segment of time. As a perfume collector myself, I felt as if I had discovered a kindred approach to personal history.
The way in which Warhol stored his collections does, however, begin to sound more like hoarding than collecting. They were boxed and put in specific rooms in his townhouse as if it were a warehouse. The distinction between these two ideas can be hard to pin down, and is sometimes a matter of perspective. In an attempt to define the difference, I stumbled upon a Reddit thread in which gamers with extensive game collections debated the nature of their passion: hoarding or collecting? The consensus was: if you’re proud of what you have, if you want to show others what you have amassed, then you are a collector. If you hide away your possessions with a sense of shame, then you are a hoarder. By this definition, then, Ernaux is a hoarder—at least until her shame ultimately leads her to get rid of her possessions.
I have generally spoken of my pencils as being a collection, but I don’t display them: I store them in their boxes in a drawer in my desk. My notebooks are also in drawers (when waiting to be used) or in IKEA storage boxes (when filled up). It’s not out of shame so much as practicality: there is only so much dusting a person can do. This was definitely the consensus on Reddit. Some of the gamers had taken up a Kondo-like approach, purging their collections of games they did not play, selling these games in order to buy ones they really wanted. I’ve given away perfumes that suited others better than they suited me, sold books I didn’t want to read again in order to get store credit to buy new ones. When plants have overgrown their situations, I’ve rooted and replanted them and given them away. But I cannot say I’ve ever had a minimalist approach to any of my collections. I don’t display them because it’s not an act put on for others, it’s for me. The very act of collecting seems to defy reason. It’s spurred by emotion. In my case, that emotion is joy.
Warhol’s art is obsessed with the proliferation of personality-less, mass produced, identical things without sentimental meaning, like soup cans. Personally, however, he loved to accumulate things that were sentimental and personal. One can imagine he made a distinction between these items, ones that proliferated without our input, created for us by capitalism, and the collections that flow out naturally from our lives and loves. As the Reddit forum demonstrates, there is also a communal spirit to collecting. I can personally count two close friendships that developed as a direct result of my perfume obsession. Walter Benjamin, who only copped to collecting books, explains that “every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books.” A pivotal book for many in my generation (which I spotted in the Major Character’s book collection) is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, in which the protagonist can only make sense of his past by reorganizing his record collection autobiographically and revisiting the girlfriends associated with specific albums. I am so attached to this book and the film version with John Cusack that I cannot watch the new series with Zoe Kravitz. (For the same reason, I still have not seen Keira Knightley’s version of Pride and Prejudice.) My fear is that once I have seen the new adaptation, my mind will have to reshuffle its understanding of the first, if not of the book itself. I am not willing to reshuffle my personal history, particularly not of those few years in the late nineties-early aughts when that film and its soundtrack first impacted my life. How beautiful and perplexing that I will never actually be able to go back there, except through my sensory memory.
In his essay “The Collector,” Walter Benjamin notes that the “positive” aspect of collecting “entails the liberation of things from the drudgery of being useful,” citing Karl Marx: “Private property has made us so stupid and inert that an object is ours only when we have it, when it exists as capital for us, or when… we use it.” Collecting, then, might be considered an anti-capitalist act, one that is concerned with the material but opposes the materialistic. As Benjamin also noted, “for the collector, the world is present, and indeed ordered, in each of his objects.” To love an object not for its use, nor for the money it makes or the time it saves, but to love it for sentimental reasons, is a way of loving the world.
The day finally came when the apartment held only our stuff: we unpacked all of the boxes and began to hang the pictures, starting with Alice’s print. The lease is in our names and the ceramic frogs are slowly filling with African violets. The kitchen holds our pots and pans and plates from New York, as well as some finds from my in-laws’ basement. One of these days, my husband and I are hoping to have the chance to go thrifting; we have a few specific things we’d like to find (a side table, a lamp base), but I have a feeling we’ll also pick up something unexpected. For the first time in our lives together, our living space has more than one room, which creates a wonderful sense of openness. We have no need to fill it, but there is room for more stuff, more joy, more life.
You must be logged in to post a comment.