“I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or with little.” Philippians 4:11-12

Ellie is readying herself for the train back to school. It is a journey closing a happy, full, multi-faceted holiday break and opening an exciting second semester of new classes, new books, new teachers to know. She is excited, but I can tell she is also anxious. And anxious always notices the stuff.

Her room here tells the story of full into free: for years my little lover of stuff tucked her treasures into that room, layer upon layer, and taped to the walls every drawing, snapshot, scrap and souvenir that passed through her fingers. You could barely think, or move or have your being in that bedroom. But she did. In her senior year, as if by programmed instinct she began the great denouement: pulling down scrap by scrap, pile by pile, trash bag by trash bag, all outward evidence of a childhood fully lived. She had bought the mantra of minimalism and in a way most admirable and shocking was slowly reducing her stash. Is it a coincidence that she, her person, seemed to fill from the inside out? I think not. The more she purged the more she glowed.

Today she is stressed, almost angry with herself, for having two travelling bags, not one, and a very strange trio of potted plants that must go back as well. How did we get them here? Her plants have grown; one needs a new pot and then warrants a plant stand. A piece of furniture is getting on Amtrak?? She must have travelled home by car, but this train travel is our preferred method. Every time I stand with her on those Ashland tracks I am waiting a train of my past, the Railjet, the Eurostar, the TGV…. to hiss in and carry me away. Vienna, Brussels, Marseille…before I learned how to buy bread or say please and thank you, I learned to read a train schedule in a foreign city. The cassette tapes Will is now fascinated with (What else do you play on a circa 1985 first generation Walkman??) are all marked “Songs for Trains.” Once upon a time, I was a travelling girl… So this is one more way I live vicariously, first through the streamlined space she leaves in my home and now by the morning of loud, cold, steaming metal. I know her angst and fretting is the percolating stress of what’s ahead. Miles to go before she sleeps, in every metaphorical sense there is. I hear her mental itinerary, said slightly above the sound of her breath: Amtrak, metro, shuttle bus, school. It is a three-hour journey, plus some. Miles to go before she sleeps.

Still I listen to her fussing, anyway. Honor it. How, my darling, can two bags unglue you? One holds a decent coat, which is no small achievement on the part of parent to child: Here child, have a coat. I might as well give William–what? A fanny pack? A pink poodle and a pedicure? I know she’s a college girl come into full reason, because I know she will actually wear the coat and be warm.

Will is at Winter Camp. He has come to his senses, although not outwardly. When we drop him at the boy scout meeting spot, two trailers splayed open, cluster of cold parents huddled about for pick-up instructions and awaiting their son’s goodbye hug like we might as well await the freezing of hell (although with these temps…), Will is wearing gym shorts and a hoodie. Forty degrees out in the blazing sun, with temps predicted in the 20s tonight, and he looks ready to shoot baskets in an overheated gym. But I know what’s in his bags. I couldn’t help and I couldn’t add anything or he would be incensed (hey…anger gets your heart rate up, that might keep you warm…) but with him he carries two coats, three sets of thermals, a sweater, sweatshirt, sweatpants and plenty of socks, some of them wool. Boy has got a brain and is using it. The dad standing next to me toys with a wool cap, pulling it from his pocket then stuffing it back in, pulling it out, eyeing the boy, his boy, jostling the other scouts stuffing their gear into the trailer. Dad looks at us sheepishly. Sorry dude. Knock down on the ride over about making him take warm head gear? Yep. Been there. Will went ballistic when he saw me slip the detached hood to his coat into his bag. Brains, maybe. But they’ll be cold brains.

Side note: It was 27 and sleeting Friday night, their first of three. They arrived after dark. There was nothing to do but pull on five layers of clothing and hunker down in their sleeping bags to keep warm. Whereupon Will, quartermaster whose name will now go down in Boy Scout fame, produces from the middle of his duffle bag an entire cooked pizza, cut into squares and still warm. Digiorno Supreme. He said one boy openly wept.

Sophie has been leaving a lot longer on no train. Her room is as stick sparse and spare as the cover of a magazine. A solar panel magazine, or one on updating your Swedish massage waiting room. I suppose if we could list the Burk motel and show potential buyers that one room, our house would sell in a day. But how can one have a sanctuary without stories? In my rooms every outline of furniture and book on the shelf tell a story, and walking through these rooms I am so well-read of life. I go looking in her space for a piece of her, a treasure like I try from time to time to hug or hold the fat on her bones, and there is nothing there. I don’t want to sit long enough to admit: I think she’s already gone.

Once I took the train back to school in Philadelphia. I was at school at the end of a commuter line, close to Bryn Mawr, but not Bryn Mawr. To get there I had to take the intercity train from the 30th street station which was the Philadelphia main station serviced by Amtrak. And I should have seen it coming, as I hauled my bags around construction tape and cement barriers and orange netting going home for my winter break–I should have seen it coming, that in the five weeks I was away they relocated the station. They were renovating and closed the station, rerouting the intercity passengers to a different station further away. And not walkable distance, either. I arrived from the six-hour trip south to hook up with my commuter train and couldn’t find it. I had bags too big and heavy to carry far, assuming when I left there would be train wheels under me even to my very door. Now there weren’t. I had to leave the underground world of tunnels and trains, go up onto the street level and proceed half-lost and on foot, carrying my overstuffed suitcases, to locate the temporary shuttle bus.

When I stumbled coming up out of the station and fell on the stairs, one of my bags burst and my stuff tumbled slowly, playfully like a slinky down the dirty steps. A bag lady sheltering there–on the cold tile stairs–came to my aid. She gave me a bag and helped me load into it the contents of my broken suitcase. Because I was young, I did not think. I did not hear the voice: walk away….walk away…. when you get old you can discern the lie told by your living room furniture and the new dishware: walk away. Life is precious and stuff is …. not. Even now, I regret–could I have blessed her with an armload of clean shirts, a sweater, a new book or two? Or would she have walked away?

These days if I told any of my mom friends their seventeen-year-old was out on the streets of south Philly with suitcases too heavy to carry, looking for a shuttle bus just before the streets grew dark and the city changed clothes for the night, perhaps they would go ballistic. No cell phone. No chaperone. Nothing then but the big, wide world and me. Maybe change for a pay phone and maybe a credit card my dad co-signed on when I was 17. But no cash. I was no boy scout. Often I travelled underprepared. I once drove home seven hours empty-pocketed up the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State, leaving hastily scribbled promissory notes and setting off every toll booth alarm. Back then it was Life 365. Each day a chance for a new adventure. Now I just sit around  stalking them and praying for low or NO adventure.

Ellie, girl, listen: stuff is not failure. In a life well-lived, my sweet, stuff sticks. It does. I tell you this: stuff finds me. The “Burk Emporium,” I call it. One of everything on the planet, or die trying. You need it? We have it. Come on by.  Bill’s family grew up in the depression, so holding onto every last scrap and made sense. When we cleared out his mom’s house, it took six months and divided the families who sent their reps to cull through and disburse the stockpile that was 42 years in the same house. That was the strongest inkling I had that stuff might not be as cool as our early marriage advertised it. I suppose nowadays that is my method to happiness, the giver/sharer: I shall be happy when my stuff finds you.

Sometimes, my girl, sometimes stuff is okay. I’ll go renegade counterculture here: lack of stuff may be pretty, and pleasing to the eye, but stuff is real. And you are real. And call me crazy, but it is simply not time for your condensing. Sometimes to live large means to have large and it can’t be helped and I would like to tell “spark joy” lady that I got a whole freaking inferno of joy going on here quite nicely, thank you very much.

Case in point: later, while we are unpacking Will’s appropriately-sized duffle from his trip and putting away the reasonable amount of gear he saw fit to pack for three days in the arctic, Sophie breezes through, unexpected as usual and only for a few fleeting moments. What could she need? What can we do for you, daughter? Well, see, she’s shooting a fake movie for her history class and she needs, count them, five or six sets of fatigues for the classmates whose parents live in pretty homes enjoying their tidy attics and polished surfaces. Probably park their cars in their garages, too.

Hmmm? Military issue camo wear in reasonable condition and a selection of sizes, you say? Got some! Be right back.