A lesson about filling life's basket with too much stuff

It hit me first as I was trying to decide between the 24-roll package of Kirkland-brand toilet tissue and the super-soft and new-and- improved Charmin while shopping Saturday at Brentwood’s Costco. It hit again when I put three 44-ounce bottles of catsup in my basket.

Who was I shopping for? Not a growing family of four that includes two teenage boys, for sure.

With one son now a college graduate and another working at a camp in Arkansas for the summer, we’re bona fide empty nesters. In fact, since it seems like my husband and I are rarely home at the same time these days, and Lord knows I seldom cook, do I really need to buy six boxes of pasta or five pounds of ground beef or a huge bag of salad greens at one time?

For years I could not understand why my now 79-year-old mother continues to keep the side-by-side refrigerator freezer in her kitchen, the big freezer in the utility room and the “extra” refrigerator in the garage packed with food. Now I get it: She never got used to her family of six becoming a family of two.

That woman could eat out of her freezer for two years and never have to go to the grocery store. She says she needs and uses it all. My siblings and I pray for the power to go off at least once a year so she is forced to clean it out occasionally and start over.

I think I'm following in her footsteps and I don't know if I like it.

The above all came back to mind in a very weird way Saturday night while watching one of the many TV news crews who had gathered at the home of Trace and Rhonda Adkins after a huge fire destroyed most of their belongings.

“It’s just stuff,” Rhonda Adkins told one of reporters on the scene in Brentwood’s BonBrook neighborhood.

She wasn’t being disrespectful of her family’s belongings, she was just putting them into the proper perspective. Her children escaped unharmed. Her nanny and the daughter of a neighbor were OK.

Stuff can be replaced. Loved ones can’t.

We all have too much stuff, and sometimes toilet paper. Do we have enough loved ones? I hope so.

Originally posted in the Brentwood Home Page.