"It's Just Stuff"

I started my new job yesterday, heading on a trajectory I hadn't anticipated. In order to mentally be in my new place, I needed to clean out the old place. I have been a teacher for more than twenty years and at the campus I just left for ten. Although it was my third office on the campus, moving offices has involved having the maintenance folks move fully loaded filing cabinets and my carrying one box at a time, unloading and reloading until the work was done.

This time was different. I probably will teach again, but I don't know when. So packing up my office felt like packing up my career. I needed to arrange things so they are accessible again. I learned that I am a hoarder of office supplies. I filled countless recycling tubs with extra handouts, articles, assignments, and meeting notes while shredding at least three huge bags of student records. Still, I knew that some things would travel with me so I could put the things I love in my office--my jar of rocks from my parent's cabin in the UP, my fishbowl full of chocolate, my stuffed hot dog guy signed by a former student who used to be one of the racing sausages for the Brewers. 


Meanwhile, one of my colleagues has retired. She is going through many of the same tasks I am of sorting, pitching, shredding, recycling, remembering, and keeping. But it is different, I think, at the end of a career. I shared this story with her, and she suggested that I share it here as well.

Cleaning out an office can be such an overwhelming task--physically, mentally, and emotionally. It is draining.

When I was a student worker in college, I helped a French professor who was being forced to retire to clean her office after a 50-year career. She sat and cried the entire time, while I gently boxed up what I could and asked her to tell me about her favorite students and scholarship and about some of the items in her office. It took three days to whittle her office down to one carload of her most precious mementos. She sent me flowers.

Six months later, her house burned to the ground in a huge fire. I thought of the boxes that contained the distillation of her office and sent her a sympathy card. She sent me more flowers, with a note that said, "It was just stuff. I still have the memories, and that was all the stuff was for--to remind me of who I've been. I lost my stuff, and I still know who I am and who I've been."