Are You A Stuff Addict?

Hello, my name is Lynda… Hello Lynda! …and I’m an addict.

I used to be addicted to cook books, then for a while it was ponchos then jackets … I spiraled into Country Road rain slickers then leather and for a few years I’ve been hooked on perfume- I have over sixty-eight bottles of the stuff. Welcome Lynda!

Stuff. I love stuff – stuff stuff stuff…there I've said it!

Stuff is my crack – my addiction. Having stuff, collecting stuff, buying stuff. Old stuff, new stuff, red stuff, blue stuff – as long as it’s stuff, I love it.

It all began at 6, when I collected seashells at the beach. I brought them home and put them in a tin soup can in my bedroom. They looked so pretty, white and coral colored, shiny and clean. I was mesmerized by their beauty. Each perfect – I selected only the best the beach had to offer. They were all mine and I loved each and every one. I’d take them out of their can and look at them. I’d line them up neatly, stack them on my dresser or I’d place them in perfect circles around my goldfish bowl. It was fun to just have them and I had to have more.

By the end of that same summer I had eighteen cans of seashells. Yes 18, that’s one – eight. The further seventeen tins of assorted seashells, starfish, clam shells, hermit crab cockles and oyster shells were I’ll admit, not as well cared for, shiny or clean as the first. But I kept going and by the end of the summer of my seventh year I had over forty-three cans of shells.

Now there is a definite downside to having over two thousand dirty shells and assorted dried fish carcases in a small bedroom… stored in old soup cans… which hadn’t been scrubbed that well or at all. Smell is one of them. My mother became worried when neighbors began commenting which is when the sad day came and my beloved collection had to be returned to the seaside. It was traumatic and I think I cried for a month. I don’t like to talk about it.

So began my fascination with the having of stuff and my obsessive cycle of procuring one group of things to the point of outrageous excess. It was the ultimate high, for instance, the time I collected all of the bubble gum trading cards from the Six Million Dollar Man series or the occasion I had managed stacking copper pennies in groups of 100’s then began gluing the stacks together. I had over twelve dollars as I recall but FYI- they don’t come apart and you’re left with a heavy lump of un-spendable metal. Mistakes were made.

As an adult this peculiar tick has grown from simple to sophisticated, haphazard to wily, free to lavish.

Now I mostly buy. Where other women might have one love of say shoes her whole life and acquire an embarrassing display of closeted goodies she never wears, I’ll embarrass myself all the time buying stupid amounts of let’s face it mostly useless items. I mean who really needs twenty-seven pitchers, sixty-eight different perfumes?

I enjoyed umbrellas for a while, they were fun; books -which is a pretty good obsession if you actually read them but no. There were decorative pillows, willow baskets, bras, earrings and lipsticks. Oil paintings, water colours and stippling’s, vases (that was a big one), frames but I ran out of interesting pictures to put in them, wooden toys, dried flowers, linens, lamps, quotes, poems, backyard game sets – you get the idea.

Thankfully I’m not a hoarder (I’ll explain). Although I admire hoarders for their tenacity and ultimate collecting ability, I could never pile myself into a corner or literally navigate through my house over milk bottles from 1984 while counting and recounting all the paper airplanes I ever made.

No, I’m a hurried gatherer, an adrenaline a-mass-er. The buzz is in the getting. Like my recent captivation with jugs. Not breasts (that would be a difficult item to collect) but pitchers, conical-shaped holders of liquid. But really there are only so many jugs you can collect and then you start to look weird. I discovered this with teapots at a B&B outside London and sadly I had to accept the same about teacups.

Lucky for the unfortunate souls who have to live with me I have a get-rid phase to my collecting which separates me from a squirrel. When I’ve amassed my many stuffs I will at some point get a small bit bored. I can’t tell you when it happens or why I just do. I just box and load my once loved carefully chosen treasures off to Vincent’s or Oxfam.

I’m sure there is someone out there who’ll enjoy my thirty-three glass owls.