HOW HE SEES IT Home alone: Decline and divestiture

By ROBERT WHITCOMB
PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
Our younger daughter trooped off to college the other week, in a hail of overdrafts and CDs. We found ourselves sitting out bankruptcy in a faded house that was suddenly not only quieter, but that also contained considerably less stuff. But then, this tale begins when children rise out of young childhood -- say, when they reach about 9 -- and ends when you're lying in a crank-up bed in a nursing home with virtually no personal possessions at all. It's the story of diminishment threaded through most lives lived to old age, its sadness perhaps mitigated by inevitability.
There is a poignant pattern: When children are little, there is in many American houses a seemingly bottomless pile of toys and other accoutrements of childhood (our society of consumption makes such accumulation all too easy). Then when they get beyond 10-ish, those treasures are gradually winnowed out, by parents and, with parental prodding, by the children themselves.
As childish playfulness declines and adolescent vanity rises, however, clothes become more important and start to spread over much of the space on the floor previously occupied by toys, puzzles, games, roller blades, etc. Still, the general direction is toward less stuff. Thoreau would approve.
When the children leave home, there is a precipitous drop in the stuff supply. They take some of it with them, and some they just throw away.
Resolving the problem
Then the parents think about moving into a smaller place. If they do move, their new place, being smaller, tends initially to be overcrowded with things for which there was plenty of room in their old place. But usually that problem is resolved as they give away stuff to their children, who might well be rearing youngsters themselves now and may need that old table or sofa or lamp, or even a long forgotten and chipped high chair. "Why don't you take it? We obviously don't need it anymore."
Eventually even such small, emotion-laden things as scrapbooks are given away, perhaps by this time to literate grandchildren. It's part of the stripping away of possessions, by throwing out or passing on, that culminates in the catastrophe of death. By then, and only if a family is lucky, there is only money to pass on.
XWhitcomb is The Providence Journal's editorial-page editor. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.