Tag: storage rooms

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Allegiance to Gratitude in Braiding Sweetgrass

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Earlier this week, I blogged about the increasing popularity of rage rooms and the owners who are purchasing vintage glassware, antique dishes, and grandma’s oil lamps to be smashed with baseball bats and golf clubs in controlled settings across the nation. They’re scouring estate sales for the dishes that families have gathered around for the last century or two, purchasing what folks can no longer persuade their children or other relatives to use in their own homes, and wearing helmets with eye protection as it’s all beaten to smithereens behind a concrete wall.

This may seem to some like a violent death of memory and sentiment. It may show disrespect to the items being smashed, from the artistry of the design to the materials used to make these things that have long held presence around tables feeding families or that have held oil to light rooms and keep aglow the faces of loved ones centuries ago.

Perhaps, though, the best chance of life these items have is in their recycling – – a reincarnation, of sorts, for things boxed up in darkness, locked away in storage, held hostage as prisoners of uselessness for decades, like the aging adult’s own version of the Island of Misfit Toys with nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait. A rage room may at first seem in direct opposition to the gratitude factor of thankfulness – but is it really any more offensive than attics full of items without purpose, kept that way by those who should value them most and keep their spirits bright?

As I drove to visit a family member having surgery two states north of me last week, I listened to Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The author herself reads the book on Audible, and hearing her voice is almost as pleasant as pausing every few minutes to truly soak in the meaning of her words from a new perspective – – and an important one. Similarly to the way Aldo Leopold reminds us of our duty to be good stewards with a strong land ethic in A Sand County Almanac, Kimmerer reminds us in her chapter “Allegiance to Gratitude” that every single item we eat or use comes at the cost of the life of a plant or animal. As good citizens, we should follow the guidelines for the honorable harvest of consumption, from the wood in our furniture to the food on our plates. Allegiance to gratitude is what begets abundance – not the collecting and storing of items that are not being used, because this disrespects the energy from Mother Earth to produce these things and invokes perceptions of hoarding: get all you can, can all you get, and sit on your can. Taking and using only what is needed is the way to be environmentally responsible for future generations. Having what can be used and fully appreciated cultivates a fuller appreciation of all of our blessings.

Gratitude has been a year-long spotlight word for me – – a goal word. It is fitting that in December, I am reading Kimmerer’s words with a renewed sense of gift giving. This year, we’re practicing a different gift-giving arrangement for my grandchildren. They’ll each receive something they want, something they need, something to wear, and something to read. We’re simplifying, redefining less as more.

We’re cultivating gratitude.

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Saying Goodbye

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I have family members who have been preparing to open a new business – a Rage Room. If you haven’t heard of these, here’s an article that explains the concept. You take all your anger into a room filled with appliances and glassware and dishes and use a bat or sledgehammer to smash everything all to pieces. These businesses are rising in popularity across the nation – not as a substitute for therapy, but as a way of releasing pent-up anger in a controlled setting.

My relatives were heading to another estate sale last weekend to buy all the china and crystal, lamps, and anything else that’s smashable, including televisions and microwave ovens. It stopped me in my tracks when I considered what some of my other relatives may think about this if they realized that their precious items may be destined to be violently destroyed.

I have other family members with storage rooms. They have been paying monthly rent for years to hold onto items they believe to have value. Unfortunately, the financial profit potential is red – it has been for years, just holding onto things, and it gets redder and redder every month a storage room’s rent is paid. By now, the cost of holding onto these things exceeds having bought them brand new several times. The greatest value that these items will ever hold, at this point, are the memories – – which can be of no value when they are held hostage in storage rooms with little to no regular use. Many haven’t seen the light of day in years, and are either in non-climate controlled storage slowly molding or are waiting their turn to be taken to a landfill.

There seems to be a commonly held belief that if we have something we got a great deal on, we could turn that as profit. And perhaps we could if we found the right buyer and if we sold it at the right time for the right price. But just like the next person, most of us are not buying things at full price. We’re looking for the deal, too.

I feel a heavy burden for a colleague’s mother who’d had a large collection of antiques and memorabilia. She’d checked on eBay and Facebook Marketplace to see what the going rates were for some similar items she’d owned for years and believed what she saw as what some of her items were worth. The sellers who mark items for sale at $12,345.67 using the negotiating strategy or assign their own notions of value to their own items had created a false sense of hope for her retirement dreams. When she died last spring, my colleague and her siblings hired an estate sale company to come in and auction all of the items that had been collected for all those years and held as sacred family artifacts.

The hard and sad truth is that these items held no sentimental meaning or memories for my friend and her siblings. They had purchased all their own furniture and belongings through the years and had all they needed, so there was no space for them to put any of their mother’s sentimental items in their homes. They each chose one small item before the auction, and that is all that remains. The rest may be getting smashed.

For some, the smashing may come as a shock. For others, the release of years of collecting items that now border on hoarding may come as a liberating, sweet goodbye to the memory of loved ones whose belongings had more hold over them than time spent with their loved ones. Whether the items they leave behind are purchased to be used as dishware at Christmas tables with families or whether they are being shattered with baseball bats and golf clubs, one thing is true: they will ultimately be released in some form or another to a new and different life. I’ve heard it put this way: Heaven isn’t lined with U-Hauls.