As I continue along the journey of my One Little Word for 2025, enough, I’ve been thinking lately about the stewardship of how I over-own things – do I selfishly trap them and call it collecting, or have I done my part by passing them along when they have lived their best life with me?
I think we all have a tendency to hoard things – to save a penny for a rainy day. But what happens when the collections have taken over our lives and the proverbial pennies are now quarters and dollars, anchoring us instead of freeing us? In 2023, I looked at all the boxes in the loft of our barn and in our attic and stepped back, taking it all in. I hung my head in shame at what I saw. It was like a graveyard of opportunity for still-useful items never seeing the light of day anymore, and I was the undertaker. I was the bad guy in the parable of the talents, burying the promise and potential of what had been entrusted to me. No, I have not been a good steward when it comes to things.
Once upon a time, I heard a saying shared by my father in a sermon. He reminded us all not to be those people who get all we can, can all we get, and sit on our can. At the end of 2023, I realized I’d been sitting on my can. And I needed to take action.
My grandparents grew up during The Great Depression, and learned about their stories when we would go visit them as my brother and I were growing up. My paternal grandparents lived in Waycross, Georgia, and they were the absolute King and Queen of double coupons. I learned a lot about frugality from them – about saving, about the concept of “enough,” and also about the disadvantages of too much. My grandmother clipped those coupons and looked for whatever was free – whether she had a plan to use it or not. At the heart of this was the need for protecting – for providing and provisioning the essential needs of a family, and I began in those days to understand the way that money could be stretched.
I used to hear the water come on, go off, come on, go off – – and years later, I realized that she showered that way. She got wet, turned off the water and lathered, turned it on and rinsed, and repeated. She double-couponed so much that they had an entire storage room of cereals and other dry goods. I was having a bowl of cereal on one visit when I noticed something moving in the milk. On close inspection, I was horrified to discover that I was eating bug swimmers. From that experience, I learned the importance of checking expiration dates.
But I also learned something else: the extreme effort on not wasting water did not transfer to the waste happening when the dry goods spoiled before they could be used. Sufficiency seemed at odds between having too little and having too much – and there are problems on both ends of that spectrum when we forget the importance of fine-tuning our needs to the middle ground of enough.
All this examining things and re-calibrating my mindset about the things I’d accumulated made me think of a childhood story that my mother used to tell me. At one time in my life, I was an aim-to-please rule following preacher’s kid who, in my young child voice, would ask my mother, “Did I bees good?” whenever the stringent need for good behavior in church or at some event, visit, or outing was over and done and I was needing my recognition and report card on my efforts. Likely, I was ready to get back to business as usual with a little badness kicked into gear and let go of the need for my best behavior.
But as I looked at all the things I was holding hostage in my barn and attic, I wanted to re-ask that question through a different lens: Did I bees a good steward of things?
Nearing 60 with retirement dreams of lightening the load to ease the way for RV travel and a significantly downsized house in the near future, I began a quest last year to clean out our home and attic and purge the anchoring cargo of a lifetime of teaching and boxes of mementos and sentiments that have outlived their purpose in my life. It’s time to prepare for the next chapter – whatever that may be. No one can move forward who is so heavily anchored in the past.
I have a question:
Did I bees a good steward of things?
Or did I hoard them?
I read a game-changing book in 2024 by Robin Wall Kimmerer, entitled Braiding Sweetgrass. At several times throughout the book, I found myself silently weeping tears for all of the boxing of things I have done in my life. As I turned the pages of that book, I imagined the life involved in all these items – the trees that once stood tall in the forest sheltering nests of woodland critters – trees that gave their lives to become books and furniture and toys; the plants that yielded cotton and other fibers to become linens and towels and clothes; the hands of craftsmen and seamstresses who shaped the creation of each thing. I was gobsmacked.
In the first month of 2025, I finished Kimmerer’s most recent book, The Serviceberry, in which she discusses the ethics of reciprocity in a gift economy. Abundance and gratitude are at their purest when we understand the concepts of the gift economy as opposed to the market economy. There is life-changing magic in the mindset and understanding that the notions of self-sufficiency and hoarding are at odds with our values and people we hold dear – and may actually be harming them. Her essay that summarizes the main concepts in her book is available here, but I offer this warning: be ready for a seismic shift in your thinking once you read it. It tops any sermon I’ve ever heard on Matthew 6:26, and ironically, birds are at the heart of the Bible verse and at the heart of The Serviceberry.
It begs the cyclical question at the end of each day, each week, each month of striving to live in a more simplistic and abundant way: did I bees good? And at the end of 2024, I could finally say that I’ve moved from being a failing steward of accumulated things to passing with a C. I still have a way to go, but I’m doing the work of managing the mountain by keeping my One Little Word front and center. I don’t buy the extra tube of toothpaste just because it’s on sale – – because I have enough. I leave some for others, and I leave room for honoring the uncluttered spaces and the sense of order. And I can feel it.
