Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American author, philosopher, and transcendentalist, coined a famous phrase in one of his poems — “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” His implied preference, like his neighbor Thoreau, was for an austere natural simplicity rather than for rampant materialism.
Still, we are all creatures of our own personal abode. There is no place like home in part because it contains and is given character by our stuff. These may include heirlooms we have inherited, familiar furniture that we find comfortable, landscapes that harbor years-worth of memories.
After a recent trip to faraway places, coming home was comforting in part because it was familiar, especially the stuff it contained. An upstairs room is a library, its walls covered with shelves that contain books organized by subject matter, genre, and author. There’s great comfort to be had from immediate access to fiction, poetry, history, fine arts, biographies accumulated over the years.
There’s also comfort to be had from a few odd artifacts or objets d’art. A farmer my mother knew when I was a child would occasionally plow up some surprising oddities in his fields and pass them on to the curious kid she’d told him would find such finds intriguing. And I did. Enough so that all these decades later I still have the molar of a mastodon that he gave me. A few other fossils are on display. He also sent me many Indian arrowheads in a cigar box that wound up in the garage and were stolen, presumably by some other neighborhood kids. A lesson to keep your stuff in a safe place.
Other stuff that warm’s the heart and gives home more character than it might otherwise possess hangs on the walls. Some are old fashioned sepia photos of ancestors long gone but not forgotten. There are also photos of the part of the world where I grew up. One of a steel mill and others of the river where we played that ran through our home town.
A fondness for Japanese Ukiyo-e prints has resulted in several walls adorned with them which depict men crossing a bridge in the rain, fishermen throwing nets in the water with Mt. Fuji in the background, sailing ships, wading birds and the like.
The walls also have reminders acquired in other far away places. Tara in Ireland, a painting of a mediterranean island complete with volcano, another of a Chinese tea plantation and its workers, a church in the English village of Rumsey where ancestors several centuries ago may have been married. There’s also a little collection of illustrations from stories found in children’s books by L. Frank Baum, Poe, Washington Irving et al. There’s also a painting of a yard sale by a woman I used to work with.
None of these pictures are especially valuable, but together they are an organic part of our lives. They give character, nostalgia, and beauty to the place where we spend our days. It is stuff that might mean next to nothing to anyone else, but it captures moments from our past and help to keep the memories fresh. The value of such stuff should not be underestimated.