It’s called the Burk Emporium for a reason. After near 30 years in the same house, two attics and three sheds-full later, we have one of everything on the planet. If not, we can surely procure one for you. And this year—well, it’s been a year of stuff. For one, middle age has us surveying the landscape in newly wise ways. All those years of college move-ins and outs (with bonus pandemic extensions), combined with the fastest quarter century on the planet, combined with glimpses now and then of our next chapter…well, let’s just say our collectibles are so plentiful they should skip dust and collect a paycheck instead.

We’ve always joked about stuff. Talked about stuff, maligned and regretted stuff. That’s the vogue way to approach it, is it not? Minimalism is in, stuff is out? Seems to me I was writing about it just a while ago; pandemic bearing down on us and I’m in the attic pulling costumes for a class video Sophie was producing (See Think I May Have One of Those, Jan. 2020). So, when exactly does “stuff” become “junk”? When does “having” become hoarding? Maybe it’s that subtle shift when time surpasses money as the greatest good. Perhaps you are already there, enjoying your sparse and monochromatic living spaces while the rest of us feel buried alive. Certainly, it’s a trendy topic. Life lived in material form, arrayed before you in décor and storage. Ah, the storage. And so here we are, right back to the Emporium.

You want it? We got it. Come on down. My family knows—and has complained for years—that I’ll sell anything that’s not nailed down. It’s true. Somebody around here looking for his or her whatsit that was kicking around the garage? They don’t ask me where it went. They just check for the listing on Ebay. My seller ID is jlb2ndchildhood. The initials are there because the moniker I chose is—go figure—something of a cliché and was already taken 22 years ago when I set up shop. My first transaction was a child-sized red and yellow plastic push shopping cart (symbolic?) to go under the Christmas tree. Since then, I have engaged in 1,788 transactions and have emerged as a “super seller.” Through a recession, a global pandemic, through three kids and the two (real) jobs I am holding down, our little Ebay side gig remains. People always willing to pay…people always looking, as I have, for lost treasures. Like it or list it.

I’ve sold winter coats, kids’ toys, collectibles, pajama lots, shoes, books and more. We’ve sold busted-beyond-repair electronics. William once jumped on a Kindle. Yes—as in, jumped full bodyweight from bed to floor on a Kindle, so then the word “cracked” became an understatement and still that pricey little piece of no return fetched us $9.99 on Ebay going out the house. We’ve sold NWT and NWOT and LK New and vintage. All of it (except that Kindle) EUC, of course. I’ve shipped antique china to California and a radar detector to Iceland. I’ve listed things as big and cumbersome as a 12-piece drum set and as tiny as a single antique gold collar button. Still, I would not recommend resale as a liquidation strategy; we’re a few million collar buttons shy of being able to park a car in our garage.

My favorite of all time is actually not selling. It’s giving. Loaning, sourcing, repurposing or even—yes, regifting. My mom is famous for this—wrapping up crafts made for her or items procured years ago and calling them “gifts.” With them come all the meaning and memories, as if we are trafficking not in tchotchkes but in the very stuff of life. In this way, re-homing takes on a special purpose and meaning: the idea of a place for everything and everything in its place—just not my place. As I helped with her house move this summer, I saw first-hand how tedious is the “rehoming” of treasures, how indistinguishable the piles that are going with you, going on (to others) and going into that gaping maw of the big Hefty steel sack there next to it all. You and a lifetime of beloved things alone against the reality: nobody wants it. That “stuff finds me” mantra of my early years has given way to a middle-aged restlessness: “I will be happy when my stuff finds you.”

Perhaps the stream of stuff and the stream of life run next to each other, the one a tangible record of the other. One of the American Girl dolls we plucked off Ebay back in the day came from a seller on her way to college who was liquidating to pay tuition. Now, more than a decade later, my own college girl is shipping her off to her next home after making a pile on Ebay.  The idea that we are but leasing the things that bring us joy and can cast them back at the end of the day… The catch and release approach to our material lives, where the fun is all in the fishing—this, it strikes me, is a most pleasing view indeed.

Thing is, stuff tells a story. That’s what makes it so hard to get rid of. One well-known minimalist out there says you must talk back to it—you must thank each piece before you let it go. If I did that, we’d be knee deep and going nowhere, standing there making niceties to overflowing closets and packed attics. Most of our stuff—when I hear it? It’s screaming—Get me outta here. But downsizing takes a village, and I love it most when someone needs what I got to sell or give. I’m sure it’s something deeply psychological—that need for approval, to have our things needed and used and appreciated, in the same way we have needed and used and appreciated them. At the end of the day, our stuff makes us matter, or we think it does. Why do you think it’s called “matter”? There’s some part of selling that participates in our deepest human longings—Pick me! Like me! Need me!—to be wanted and valued

Come to think of it, we’re all selling something around here. In a crucible-like season of “Take me!” we have three—count them, three anxious applicants this fall—one for college and two for graduate school. Do you remember that deadline-driven hum over the whole house, everybody a little more testy than usual? That’s it here. Times three! There was a week last month I thought my head would pop off for all the editing, the deadlines, the pressure. I think they all three hit “submit” within 48 hours of each other. Ellie applied to grad school in Italy in archeology. She fell in love with all things underground and the science that goes with it when she managed to study abroad in the 11^th-and-a-half-hour of her undergraduate career. And everybody say: stupid Covid. But she went, she saw, she conquered—and now she wants to go back. I’m trying to get over the irony that our hyper-minimalist girl who constantly prunes, purges, very intentionally undoes the material accumulations of modern life now wants to PAY to get an advanced degree in digging stuff up! Heck, I could save you a pile, dear daughter, just by handing you a shovel and pointing the way to the garage.

Sophie, slam braced for exams at the moment, is in between making little forays to some top east coast schools to sell—well, herself. Environmental management and theology. That UVA diploma almost in her pocket and her sanity as collateral, she meets with admissions and professors to discuss her “next step,” suffering big time from the impostor syndrome. Thinking there’s no way….there’s no way. Well? You never know. One thing we’ve learned: where there’s a way there’s a Will. Are here he is: once and done. Having driven himself on his college tours this summer and read in detail every 3^rd -class college brochure that came in the mail this fall, Will picked the one that just last week picked him. Sociology–maybe? Wants to know how people tick so he can take care of them. Appalachian State. He looked at others and agreeably applied to a “safety school,” but ultimately, he knew—he needed to be in the woods. (See Three Chairs, Apr. 2020). Again, the irony. The irony(!!)—our hole digging, tent living, self-proclaimed hermit is going for his MSW so he can work with people.

So, after 27 years of children coming and going at the Burk Motel, as we have always called it, the faithful proprietor and I are finished. Or nearly so. I’m serious about pulling down the re-sale shingle after Will goes. Puttin’ a sign on the Emporium door—”Headed for the trail”—and I ain’t comin’ back. Will’s senior year is sailing by as I thought it might and in ways I can only hint at, giving closure with a capital C. You know what he got for yearbook superlatives? “Most unforgettable.” And what we have there, people, is a bona fide euphemism with a capital E. So, I guess that about sums it up. In some ways he finishes not once, but for all five of them. He has indeed made our days, our seasons and now our years unforgettable—and truly precious.

The rest of it—it can all go. My mother, who moved shop this summer after 47 years in the same house, once called her people “gold.” I think she got that right. Our finest merch is here, in living, breathing, beautiful form. It’s not so far off, I think, to speak of life in terms of buying and selling. After all, the greatest gift ever given is often understood in economic terms. We have been bought at a very great price, indeed. Ransomed. Redeemed. So, I’m putting these treasures out into a world that truly needs them. They are not for sale—they are fully paid for. World, you may have them for free. But you must take very, very good care of them.

I tell you what, bring offerings.

“I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not; But there is much, that, while I cannot give you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take Heaven. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take Peace. The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet, within our reach, is joy. Take Joy.”

— Fra Giovanni 1513

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