Objects of Our Affection: Uncovering My Family's Past, One Chair, Pistol, and Pickle Fork at a Time

Objects of Our Affection is about one family, and it’s also about why we Americans have so much stuff, and why we hang onto it. There are thousands of storage bins out there, not to mention unexamined attics, which attest to our love of our things... to the nervousness we feel about getting rid of Aunt Martha’s soup tureen... to the sadness we feel if we even think of selling the antique chair that Grandpa always sat in... and to the stories we are even now attaching to that mug we just picked up at the flea market.

My sister and I were in the process of trying to deal with a couple of storage bins of family possessions when I began thinking about it all: WHY was this so hard? We each already had a house full of furniture, and we sure didn’t need any more. But this stuff had been in the family for many years, and it seemed sort of, well, disrespectful to get rid of it.

And yet we did--or a lot of it, anyway--after a good deal of soul-searching. Objects of Our Affection is the story of that odyssey from the attic to the storage bins to the auction house... and beyond.

What I learned in the process was that the family was in the furniture. Our family was military, for generations, and that made us the essential American nomads. I believe that is part of why my parents, grandparents, and the generations before them had held onto the things they brought with them as they traveled the globe. Their things had become their home, which made those possessions all the dearer to them. But we are a nation of nomads, and I think that sense of finding home in our things is why all of us hold onto them so tightly, whether we realize it or not.

I also learned that, even if your family isn’t loaded with things, anytime you acquire an object, a story starts around it. Once you realize that the stories are what you really cherish, that makes it a little easier to accept the idea of letting go. Our own stories included traces of an 1870s childhood in Apache territory; battles in China, France, the Philippines, and South Dakota; a Down syndrome son who died young but left an indelible impression; my grandmother’s secret marriage and subsequent annulment, which had never been mentioned in the family; a silent tug-of-war with a mother-in-law. The stories lived on in horsehair chairs and carved chests, in a silver locket, and yes, in that pickle fork--but also in a simple salt shaker.

So... the objects: We can keep them, we can give them up. The stories remain. They are the heart of the matter.

Objects of Our Affection is my fifth book. During a life as a journalist, I edited the Home & Design pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote press releases about Jacques Cousteau, traveled 13,000 miles around the country in 14 weeks, and became passionate about what makes us tick, as Americans. I’m convinced our stuff holds a big piece of the answer to that question. --Lisa Tracy

(Photo © Fran Fevrier)