Tomorrow, we move out of an apartment that we bought in 2014. I’m surrounded by stuff and memories. The memories I’ll keep. The stuff I’m not so sure about.

My wife has organised everything. She has planned, sorted, boxed and labeled all the stuff that has washed into this small apartment on the tide of our enthusiasm. 

I lift, carry, drive things to the dump and wonder where my wife gets all that energy from. 

As I look at the neatly labelled boxes piled in the centre of rooms that no longer feel like ours, I marvel at how much stuff there is. 

When we bought this place, we were still living in Switzerland. We’d been there for more than a decade and were wondering if we would ever come home and if we did, where would home be, in the South West England County Town our now-rented house was in or in the huge port city on the river we grew up next to in the North West of England? We’d been living a hermit crab existence, scuttling from rented shell to rented shell in a country not our own. They were nice shells in a beautiful place but we were already wondering it they’d ever be home. So when a windfall gifted us some cash, we decided to buy an apartment in an iconic building in the port city and see if it might become somewhere we belonged.

The place was pretty but empty and anonymous, so we made it our own by adding the furniture and cookware and bedding and curtains and glasses and cutlery and crockery that even people flying in for a few days at a time needed to have. It was fun. We created a peaceful haven where little was demanded of us. We were surrounded by the accents we’d grown up with and people who we understood. For a while, I wondered if this might be the home of our downsized future.

COVID showed us that the apartment would never be home. We spent the lockdowns in our sunny garden, hundreds of miles south of here and were grateful. We knew then that we’d never choose to stay in a place with no outside space.

Yet it wasn’t an easy place to part with. It was pretty and quiet and close to family and it gave us an alternative view of England that we enjoyed. 

When we’d bought the place, we’d called it a pied à terre, a foot in the door. It was a temporary dwelling we’d hold for four or five years. It would be gone by 2020. 

A decade rolled by, indifferent to our plans and we realised that the place was slowly becoming more of a burden than an asset. Reluctantly we decided to move.

Which sounds easy but wasn’t. 

So many things got in the way. All the admin. All the rules. Then finally, all the stuff.

It’s nice stuff for the most part. Stuff we chose and cherished. Stuff that has served us well. 

If I was talking about people and not stuff, I’d feel an obligation to maintain the connection but this is just stuff. I am not the stuff I own, unless I let that stuff own me. 

So, as we pack and move we are thinking about letting go, not just of the place but the stuff. 

The apartment already has a new owner, keen to move in an make this place their own. The stuff is in Limbo for now.

I see a reckoning coming, a home-grown mix of Potlatch and Swedish Death Cleaning where we look at all of our stuff and ask: “Do we need it? Do we love it?” When my mother wanted to show her disdain for an object she would say, “I wouldn’t give it houseroom.* We need to think carefully about what stuff we’ll give housefoom to as we head towards our eighth decade. The rest we’ll give away or discard. 

I’m looking forward to a life where our stuff is there because we chose to have it there. I think that’s a kind of freedom.

Anyway, I wondered if anyone else thought about stuff in this way, so I went looking for a poem. I found ‘Stuff’ by Sara L Russell. Now I know I’m not alone in not wanting to let stuff get in the way.

Here’s her poem:

Stuff by Sara L Russell

This is the stuff of nightmares.
This is the pile that
should have been filed,
this is the stuff 
I keep walking past 
only seen out of 
the corner of my eye 
the dust of decades 
the must of decay
from back in the day
when I couldn’t give a stuff.

Procrastination 
delayed redecoration 
postponed relocation 
this is the stuff 
that keeps us shackled
 to the ground. 
These are the bags
the cat made into
a Wendy house;
those are the dregs
of some of the worst poems
ever written, spat out
by a choking shredder;
this is the header
of an unfinished book..

Life is like a book that
cannot be redrafted,
a movie withonly one take,
no break,
no remake;
and everyone wants
to move
to the countryside 
or the seaside 
or anywhere that isn’t here -
but sometimes 
stuff gets in the way.