Possessions...the Scarf

The Visible Woman...owns.

It seems like I've been trying to divest myself of stuff for my whole life. When I graduated from high school, my parents moved not long after. I think my mother did some divesting for me while I traveled a few places that summer. The peripatetic life of a college kid and then a young person forced frequent relocation and with it reconsideration of what stuff went along. When I moved to Austin, I had moved all my possessions to my parents' house and garage and taken a trip to Europe. From there I moved them to a small one bedroom and had to buy a bit of furniture for it! I think I actually made a list detailing every single possession in each box for that move. Seriously?

We lived for 31 years in one house, but we remodeled and refitted multiple times. So we were constantly plowing through stuff to get out of the way of progress. Of course, when we had to get out of that house we found many things to deal with anyway. And over the last decade or so we have dealt with every single possession our two sets of parents owned at the end of their lives.

Still I'm obsessed with possessions and what I let stay around. I know everything is supposed to be used, consumed or give pleasure. Even living in 1200 square feet many objects don't qualify.

During Holidailies I'm going to do some entries about possessions and focus on a few things I own...some useful, some funny, some nostalgic. To speed things up I'm going to eschew pictures for a lot of them.

Today's possession, then...it's a scarf, a muffler if you will. It is plaid with grays and maroons a just a couple of yellow stripes running through it. I bought it somewhere in Europe, most probably Germany, in 1972. Somehow I've not misplaced it, ripped it or gotten to the point that I don't want to wear it. Every winter it gets some use. Everything should be like that. You should be able to buy something and keep it for four decades or so and use it frequently. (Well as frequently as one needs a muffler in the land of endless summer.) Of course, now I'll probably misplace it. Mufflers, like gloves, are so easily misplaced!

Of course, really, it's just stuff!