Turning kipple into treasure

Or how I finally emptied the storage unit

After 10 years, I shut the door for the last time on an empty metal storage unit in a small suburban town in California. The one that for all these years had held the details of my mother’s life and mine, along with bits and pieces that had been cherished by my grandmother and even my kids. Three generations of ‘stuff’ that had been lovingly collected bit by bit, once upon a time, but was now fully dispersed to various corners of the world. Hopefully not too much of it has ended up in waste disposal sites.

Books and rugs and pots and candlesticks. Dolls and games and paper maché decor. Clothes and skis, pottery and paintings, letters and photographs: all the things that had been lovingly made, worn, and enjoyed once upon a time. Now it was all scattered to other people and places. 

But first an introduction to the most useful word; honestly, you NEED to know this. 😄 And ironically, the friend who introduced me to this word is also the friend who helped me finally shut that door for the last time on the storage unit. 

So - drum-roll, please…. Let me introduce you to: KIPPLE. 

Here is the explanation from the article that my friend recently shared with me:   

“Kipple,” Deckard explains in the book, “is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers...When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it.”¹

Kipple perfectly describes the life of my storage unit.

During the last 8 of those 10 storage unit years, my visits back to California always consisted of at least one full day at the storage unit, trying to sift through the items and decide what to do with them. When my mom was still alive, every once in awhile she would ask for something from it, but mostly she was slipping away mentally, so she didn’t remember or want anything that was packed away, even though so much of it had been stored at her initial insistence. “I still want that”, she would insist if I asked her about something nondescript. I couldn’t possibly tell her that she wasn’t ever going to be living in a place (physically and mentally) where she could enjoy it again. 

Early days: still room to move and space at the top!

I got to be well-acquainted with the couple that managed the storage unit place: Brad and Gloria. They lived on site and kept the entire complex of several buildings immaculately clean.  Sometimes while riding around on his golf cart to take me across the complex, Brad would tell me stories about the other people who had storage units there. Besides everyone else’s stuff, Brad and Gloria kept secrets: he made sure divorcing couples had units in different parts of the complex so they wouldn’t see what each was hiding from the other, for example. I did not want to know more.

The first small storage unit was initially my mothers ‘extra things’ that couldn’t fit into the new one-bedroom apartment when she downsized. We put the extra things there until she could sort through them. “I might need them!” she insisted. Things like 10 year old magazine articles about places in the world her travel clients used to go, or might want to some day. Even though she was using a computer, did much of her travel booking online, and more importantly wasn’t doing that work anymore, she still had file cabinets, boxes, and grocery bags overflowing with magazine clippings. 

For those of you who have been reading along for a few months, or who knew me back then, you also know that my mother was a bit of a hoarder. Not in the collecting weird things and never throwing them away to the point of filth or danger, but rather someone who had a few too many much-loved collections of various things: stuffed teddy bears and porcupines, for example, and of course previously referenced holiday decorations, gift-wrapping paper, and ‘art supplies’. She also had beautiful books in French and English, original art and sculptures, Native American pottery from her beloved New Mexico, and so on. 

Random sample of books that my mother had collected. There were BOXES of these.

After a couple more of her moves (a story for another day), we had also traded up the storage unit for bigger sizes. Each time we increased the size of storage unit we also got better and better at packing like a ninja. Which is great until you actually need to find something. Then it was more like Jenga². Actually a LOT like Jenga. 

The next expansion of the storage unit came when I decided to move to England with my partner, and had no idea if this great adventure would last one year, two years, or, who knew?³. So, I rented my condominium, and moved out all of my and my two university-aged children’s personal effects into storage, for an indefinite period of time. We doubled the storage unit size and I (and my lovely dear friends as well as my kids) spent most of the summer before I left packing and filling up the storage unit whilst also trying to sift through as much of my, my moms and my kids kipple that we didn’t need anymore. 

And the jenga begins...

Fortunately my kids were so stunned by the volume of kipple their grandmother had kept, and had been helping me to process through it all for the past few years, that when I started asking them if they wanted any of this or that of mine, or things that I had ‘saved’ for them (just like my mother had done for me), they wisely said, ‘No thank you. Let’s pass that along now.‘ 

No mom, we don’t want any of it…

No matter how many trips I took to the salvation army, or sold, or gave away things on marketplaces or to friends, the amount of kipple inside the storage unit NEVER seemed to get smaller. Instead of decreasing, the size and volume of stuff kept increasing, as did our ninja packing skills.  

KIPPLE!!!

It was getting to be too much time and mental energy to deal with during every trip to California, and increasingly expensive to keep. And so began several years of the great purge of my life, with the ever-present enormous storage unit looming over me in my dreams and in real life. 

Every trip now had at least several days focused on purging the storage unit. I would get Pete (or my kids, or my dear friends) to help me pull out as much as we could from one corner of the unit out into the hallway. I would stay for a few hours sorting through and creating piles or ‘regions’ of where things needed to go. My helpers would come back with lunch and drinks, and we would load up the car with kipple for the trip to the charity store, or the bookstore that bought books, or we would tag the items to sell. And then we would spend another hour or two packing the leftovers back up again into the unit.  

During this time, the force of nature that is Marie Kondo came into our lives. I really should be grateful as reading her book actually helped me find a method, and honestly the emotional strength, for going through the mountains of stuff in our storage unit, and also back at home in our ‘real’ life too. 

Most importantly, she helped me feel OK about letting go of things I had believed I should keep because they were important to my mother or grandmother, even though they had no meaning to me. Letting go of them would mean those things that had served one person well could now become useful or beautiful to someone else. My kipple could transform into someone else’s treasure! That had to be better than being locked up in a dark storage unit, multiplying.

After a few more years, the final load of kipple valuable books and true treasures that I couldn’t justify keeping but was still struggling to let go, left the storage unit with my dear friend who has crazy-good ebay selling skills. Honestly, it felt great. And of course she’s the one who recently introduced me to kipple. 

The last bits before empty …

Over time, I have to admit to a tiny pang of sadness when I think about individual pieces of the kipple that has passed through my life. But I also try to remind myself that it has become treasure for someone else and has gone to a much better place than a dark storage unit with hidden secrets in a small suburban town.

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Now I’d love to hear from you! Do you struggle with keeping maybe a little too much stuff? Are you a minimalist? Is it hard to give away things that have sentimental value? Has anything helped you change your perspective at any time?

Wishing you bright skies and spring-like weather with no time inside storage units this week!

Until next time-

xx Sabrina

1. The following excerpt and the definition above come from: What is kipple, and how did it take over my life? by ROBIN ABCARIAN https://enewspaper.latimes.com/desktop/latimes/default.aspx?pubid=50435180-e58e-48b5-8e0c-236bf740270e

“…it was coined by the great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick in his 1968 dystopian novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”  For those who need a plot refresher — or have not seen the 1982 movie “Blade Runner,” which was based on the novel — the story takes place in the future, after Earth has been mostly destroyed by a global nuclear conflict, World War Terminus. Most animal life has been extinguished. The population has emigrated to “off-world colonies.” The word is used by the book’s protagonist, Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter assigned to kill some uncannily human-like robots who have escaped involuntary servitude on Mars and returned to Earth, where they try to pass as people.”

2. Jenga is a game of physical skill created by British board game designer and author Leslie Scott and marketed by Hasbro. Players take turns removing one block at a time from a tower constructed of 54 blocks. Each block removed is then placed on top of the tower, creating a progressively more unstable structure. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenga

3. Time check: currently I’ve been in the UK for 13+ years with no end in sight