It is hard to let go of things – so much so that in the U.S. we spend more than twenty billion dollars a year on self-storage units. Besides dealing with our own stuff, many of us are finding we are also dealing with our parents’ and grandparents’ stuff as they pass on. So many of these objects remind us of stories: stories of our childhood, and stories of the history of our families. No wonder it is hard to let them go. In telling her own story of letting go of several households of furnishings, Lisa Tracy is enormously helpful to us as we grapple with the “stuff” of our lives. She understands the stories inside the “stuff”. She says, “I think that it takes enormous emotional and mental energy to deal with our things. Why? Because we put ourselves, we put our lives, we put our stories, and in a sense we put our family into the objects.”
