I used to call myself a minimalist, because designers yearn for a home of pure function. Nothing is less Dieter Rams than porcelain figurines. When I moved in with my fiancée, our Uhaul unpacked an endless panoply of nostalgia. Angie had moved a lot before we met, and each stop was marked in shot glasses, vintage tablecloths and inherited cameras. I'll admit to being ungracious. Detritus weighted on me, why own things you can't use?
In the fall my grandparents moved to assisted living, out of the home on Osakis Lake they'd spend 50 years in - the home my dad had been raised in. I drove out to help clean and box. My aunt greeted me, the front door propped open with a brick, "Everything important has already been moved, take anything you want." The living floor was empty, just dishes on the counters and ghosts on the paneling where pictures had hung. But the basement and garage were a rainforest of ancient National Geographics, Y2K canned goods and hand tools.
When I left Osakis, my aunt and uncle had emptied the house, and I had a trunk full of things I couldn't throw away. The baseball bat my Grandpa held while the Twins won the world series the year that I was born. The tools he used to repair his Ford F150, and the animal-print mugs that my Grandma let me dip sugar cubes in coffee from. I don't play baseball, so the bat stands quietly in a corner, but I drink coffee from those animal mugs every day.
