On beach runs, I cannot resist the amber agate, striped limpet, or rare bit of glass. I circle, bend to pluck them from the ground, and bring them home. I pile stones on the coffee table, line limpets on the kitchen counter, and upstairs too, beside the sink and on either side of my computer—the irregular translucent quartz and smooth flat ovals of jasper and agate. The baby sand dollars. Eventually, they find their place in bowls and jars. A couple of decades ago I collected more than a dozen Coach bags by bidding on Ebay. I carry a flat red bag on weekends. I pack another large bag for overnights. But there is also the brown bag I bought for my first teaching job. The rest were pointless accumulation. My mother would have understood.

Mom was a great collector, which I am reminded of by an article that extols the benefits of having a hobby. My mother’s attic had dozens of dolls, doll house furniture, doll dresses and doll parts, needlepoint supplies, boxes with lace and others with glass ware, porcelain figurines, teapots, furniture, framed prints, ornamental boxes, carpets that had been ordered and never even unrolled, pillows—so many pillows everywhere that you could not sit on any of the furniture downstairs—and books of course. Many books. This was her hobby, collecting.

A child of the Depression, she collected things as if she needed to anchor herself with their weight. So many things stacked nearly to the ceilings, so close together is was hard to see all of what was there. She bought things and then bought more of them in different sizes and colors and manufacturers. Mom was always particularly proud of things she found at a bargain price, things we found together. Together we shared many stories that connect to her collections. She possessed lovely things, but too many to show, too many even to keep track of. She filled her house and after she died, we’ve tried to let it all go. 

Thirty-odd years ago I attended a Seattle conference because the keynote speaker was a writer I’d admired for many years. [Go find her magical memoir, Woman Warrior, and be impressed.] Maxine Hong Kingston will be 86 in October. When I saw her, she was a tiny woman with long white hair. The man who introduced her got the title of her book backwards—the audience sucked a breath. [He praised her for doing exactly what another author had criticized her for, the same thing he’d criticized another woman for doing in novels.] She came to the stage and instead of talking about her books, she described her experience in the recent Oakland Firestorm of 1991. She’d been north for her father’s memorial, participating in a Chinese custom of burning paper, her mother saying, “More, more. He wants more,” as they tossed red paper houses and food into the fire. 

Afterward, as she drove south toward home, she listened to radio reports of the fire rushing through her hillside city overlooking San Francisco Bay. Sixty-five mile an hour winds blew fire through neighborhoods, reaching the scale of a 107-alarm fire. Twenty-five people died, more than 3000 homes and 400 apartment buildings burned to the ground. Freeway exits were closed and guarded, and the landscape became almost unrecognizable. 

That morning she lied to guards, sneaked around barricades, and finally found the site of her home, smoking and leveled. Fire had consumed everything she owned and obliterated her neighborhood—a wonderfully diverse community of wealthy and modest homes, young and old people, integrated in ways that could never be recreated. She stood in the street and wept for what was lost. A young man who had also evaded the National Guard and police gave her a ride on his bicycle and that night she slept in a San Francisco hotel, called friends to assure them she was safe, her car parked below and the contents of a handbag her only worldly possessions. She lost an entire novel, burnt up in her computer.

And then, she said, something marvelous happened. She sat on the bed in an impersonal San Francisco hotel and realized that she was all she had left. As if it were a physical lightening of her life, she felt a lifting of that burden of possession—to be without. “If you ever have the opportunity, don’t miss it,” she told us. “It doesn’t last long.” By evening she had pajamas, a toothbrush, an alarm clock, and then it was over. She was again burdened with stuff. 

The banquet hall fell silent as we tried to imagine that feeling. I reached for what she so clearly knew—that lightening.

Even my mother, in her last years, began to let go. Future projects, stuffed bears and dolls and bits of china—none of it seemed to move her anymore. The last time she entered assisted living she took a few things with her, but not everything and nothing in particular. I asked her whether she wanted from the big glass door chest and she couldn’t be bothered with more than small cupboards. What dolls did she want? Whatever I decided. They no longer mattered. She even stopped shopping on line toward the end.

I’ve gave away the Coach bags. I didn’t need them and I didn’t feel right having things I didn’t use. I have cabinets of beautiful things I love, but if I don’t get rid of them, someday someone else will have to do it for me. .A friend confessed on Facebook that she’d counted 31 pairs of jeans in her closet. One of my favorite fantasies was moving to a smaller home where I would have no choice but to jettison treasure. We’ve been doing that. I fantasize about owning a total of 31 items of clothing, including socks and bras, underpants and shoes. Imagine.

We are a curious species and we admire beauty, wishing to surround ourselves with handsome things. Perhaps we feel they prove something about us—that we appreciate them, that we possess them. Maybe only that we can remember what they signify—the day we found them, who we were the, the people we were with, the bargain they represent. But ultimately, it is all just stuff.

On my runs, I pause for a stone or shell and stash it in the side pockets of my cotton running tights, the chest pocket of my zipped top. Sometimes I am clattering by the end of my run. I spill out my finds onto the kitchen counter, or forget I have them and they fall to the floor when I strip for my shower.

When I was teaching, a few times sniffer-dogs were brought into the school to search for drugs. The dogs are trained to locate the scent and are not otherwise particularly bright. They need to be rewarded even when they find nothing. They found nothing, so the handler provides a scent for them to find so that they can be rewarded: “Good girl” and given a treat. Positive reinforcement.

Gathering glass and pretty rocks while collecting litter on our walks is our “Good dog, and here’s a treat.”

Even during the pandemic, Gary and I removed diabetic syringes and fluorescent tubes from the shore. We continue to resent and mostly refuse to touch filled and neatly knotted poop bags left behind. People think orange peels are vegetable matter and will break down, and like banana peels and those “compostable” poop bags, they will break down, maybe after a year or five. Among the ordinary things we find and dispose of are cigarette butts, candy wrappers, bait bag labels, water bottles and their lids, fishing line, and other fishing gear. What we “collect” is another matter. We have bowls of pumice, pearly shells, eight species of limpet, milky quartz, amethyst, orange and amber stones, the back shells of chitons we call “butterflies,” and sea glass. The glass is what we are actually seeking while gathering litter, shells, and pretty stones from the shore. But the actual, most basic point is walking two miles or three or six. The actual goal is the walk because it’s good for us.

I don’t need to keep any of these collections, and eventually they will find their way back to sand. Like the beaded bags I collected in my teens and twenties, thousands of books, and other treasures, most of our possessions will be disposed of without a pang by someone after we’re gone. Possessions are nothing. We don’t need objects to prove we are here or to be remembered. I don’t feel weighted down by all this stuff, but I appreciate that we must face the world alone. Alone, there is still us, and to be unburdened of all the rest might be a curious and marvelous liberation.