Folks who are extra tidy are sometimes unfairly accused of having OCD, while those of us who leave things lying around are labeled as slovenly. This is a dynamic that plays out between Russet and me. Needless to say, I’m the messy one. On the whole, we do a pretty good job of finding a middle ground based on mutual respect and a willingness to compromise.
My tendencies were formed in childhood by a pack-rat mother who was also lax about making me pick up after myself. When my parents passed away, I continued my family’s heritage by cramming as many of my newly inherited heirlooms as I could into my small house.
Researching for this essay, I found out that my family’s modus operandi was typical for that time, according to Susan Strasser, the author of “Never Done: A History of American Housework.” While older generations had enough things, they “would accumulate those things over a lifetime and value that process,” she told The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull. That was the old tradition I followed.
But, Mull writes, a radical change in consumption happened early in the last century, shifting from making things at home or buying from local sellers to relying on centralized manufacturing, “setting us on a crash course with the big-box behemoths that largely dictate the country’s consumption patterns today.”
That’s absolutely true!
But there’s another reason for keeping a lot of crap in my house: frugality, another habit I inherited from my parents. They had been taught an unforgettable lesson during the Great Depression: save everything, because you might need it someday. This included filling drawers with used aluminum foil, pieces of string, random screws, nuts and kitchen utensils that hadn’t seen action in a decade.
Long after the depression, when my father had an above-average job, my mother still darned our socks, and insisted on making my clothes until I rebelled in grammar school after the other kids made fun of my “funny” clothes.
That was the 1950s. The question for us young folks then was, as Strasser phrased it, “Were my friends and I going to keep doing what we’d been raised to do and make one roll of aluminum foil last four years?” During that decade, she says, American clutter made its debut as the source of cultural anxiety we know today.”
Back in the day, my grandparents on both sides of my family exhibited no such anxiety. Their houses, barns and outbuildings were all crammed to the roof with anything and everything they might ever need. The accumulation was done slowly and caringly over generations, saving items of sentimental value along with anything that might one day be needed, including broken down cars and trucks that might be used for parts.
Needless to say, the hard-won lessons from the depression have now faded to the vanishing point. We have decisively moved from the age of accumulation to the age of mindless consumption. How else can I say it?
American consumers have become mindless gluttons.
As a result, we had no choice but to build larger homes to store all our new possessions. And that’s exactly what happened! Eight decades ago, after World War II, houses in the suburbs were quite modest: for instance, those famous, preplanned homes in Levittown were only about 850 square feet.
Flash forward to today, and the median size of an American single-family home has doubled to over 1,600 square feet. Looking around Northwood, many of the new houses are full colonial style and appear even bigger than that.
Donald Trump, the former real estate mogul, would be proud. When it comes to the size of our houses, we build the biggest in the world.
But that’s not what really gets my goat: it’s not so much the larger sizes of our homes, but despite that, we still lack space for our stuff. We now have to rent space in self-storage buildings that seem to be popping up everywhere. We even have three in Northwood. However, I suppose that’s not surprising, since New Hampshire ranks fourth in the country, with 49% of our properties using self-storage units.
Our insatiable appetite for stuff reminds me of the “greed is good” mantra popular during the Reagan administration, along with another popular phrase from that era, “he who dies with the most toys wins.”
I take offense at these sayings — along with the popularity of self-storage units — agreeing with Tom Toles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist. He postulated that whoever it was that came up with that saying, “deserves to be noted for being able to get it out while throwing up a little in the back of his mouth.”
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.