Unlike our ancestors, we aren’t forced to occasionally leave our stuff behind. To radically purge it. We cycle through and collect things across our lives. As Mary Oliver put it in her poem “I Own a House,” “I own a house, small but comfortable. In it is a bed, a desk…a telephone. And so forth—you know how it is: things collect.” Things collect, indeed. But our things aren’t collecting in small cottages, like the type Oliver lived in. The average home has grown 75 percent since 1910. It is now roughly twenty-five hundred square feet. In some cities, homes have tripled in size, like in my
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