Chapter 2

My minimalism journey began when I joined the Army.

I joined fresh out of high school with no idea what to bring with me. I shipped out from the Detroit MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) with a gym bag full of a few articles of clothing—a couple pair of jeans, t-shirts, and some underwear; and a small suitcase containing all my toiletries—soap, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, blow dryer, hairspray and make up.

Armed with this minimal amount of “stuff” I shipped out to serve my country.

The truth is the only reason these items were all I packed was because I thought that was all I could bring. Or all I should take. I was joining the Army. Didn’t that mean I would be running around in those dress green uniforms all day? Housed in barracks with rows and rows of bunk beds. I didn’t need anything else, and I didn’t have room for anything else.

Also, it was all I could carry. At 5’, 100 pounds, I really couldn’t carry a large amount of luggage with me.

That is what I pictured.

I can’t believe now; how wrong I was!

I can’t believe now that I didn’t ASK!! And no one told me any different.

But that meant everything else I owned, EVERYTHING, I left behind. All my other clothes, any possessions--records, journals, notebooks, books, jewelry, childhood toys--I left in the house I grew up in.

I never intended to abandon everything else I owned I just didn’t think I could take it all with me.

Years later my mom emptied the house and put it up for sale. I was busy in the military life and for some reason, my mom got rid of all my "stuff". Everything. My clothes, my toys and dolls from when I was little, diaries... I do not even know what she did with it all. I assume she threw everything away. I don’t know.


The only thing I had from my "before Army" time was a single solitary box my younger sister saved. The box held costume jewelry in a jewelry box, some notebooks from high school, saved senior pictures, and an old autograph book. The notebooks I would not have bothered saving.

               Although I appreciated my sister saving that box, over the decades I often wondered why my mother never asked me if I wanted any of my stuff. She never asked me, and for some unexplained reason, I never thought to ask her.

               My mom passed away a few years later from Leukemia. I never did have an opportunity to ask her.

Most of the items in that saved box I have since thrown away. Other than a few pieces of costume jewelry and the pictures that held special memories, I don't know that I have any of that "stuff" anymore. And I'm glad I don't!

I was jealous when Ed's mom, in our early twenties, kept dropping off boxes and boxes of HIS childhood memories! We had that notebook of movie tickets stubs, he had old metal lunch boxes (Star Wars and the Six Million Dollar Man), one was filled with an enormous match book collection, spaceship model pieces, books, figurines, microscope, books, comic books, t-shirts, and tons and tons of his drawings and sketches.

Each box his mom dropped off was filled with memories of his past. Those items documented his childhood immersed in science fiction, his love of Star Wars and comic books, and his budding drawing talent.

Ed’s mom dropped off boxes with photo albums full of choir competitions and plays, and memorabilia from his European trip with the Iowa State Chorale documenting much of his high school years.

I heard over and over about his trip throughout Europe, singing with the group selected from the entire state of Iowa. He had all kinds of memorabilia and shirts from that trip.

Perhaps that initial loss of my “stuff” was one of the triggers for my natural “pack rat” tendency to save things--to hoard “memories”. To keep those things that brought back the memories and not allowing them to slip through my fingers, and potentially, from my memory, forever.

Ironically, where I was poor on boxes of things representing the memories of my childhood, Ed was rich in boxes and boxes of memories of his.

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