Every Saturday morning, we would get up and watch TV, but eventually Mama would send us outside to play and then she’d lock the door. After hours of luxuriating in the house despite our intermittent pleas to be let back inside, she’d realize how messy it was, supposedly the result of our rambunctions from the past week. So, she’d invite us back in and promise to take us to Wal-Mart if we all got together and cleaned the house. But no matter how clean it got, we rarely went to Wal-Mart afterwards. But she’d somehow end up on a Wal-Mart trip on her own later in the week, bringing in stuff that we weren’t allowed to use or touch, filling up the few corners not taken up by our bodies. But if we ever tried to throw anything away, she’d hover over us and talk about how valuable it was, how we might need it for this or that one day, so things just began piling up in the corners not taken up by our bodies. And every Saturday, she blamed the messy house on us once again. We left home, married, had children of our own, struggled with the seeds of “stuff” blooming inside of us and sprouting out in different ways. I had an abhorrence for stuff, an almost OCD-fear of collection, so nothing invaluable or valuable stayed around for long. My kids complained of how I always threw away their valuable stuff. One sister claimed to hate Mama’s house, but hers looked a lot like it, except the stuff was just piles of books, stacked in spaces and corners ,never on shelves or in containers. Another sister had a stressfully sparkling house, a place you liked taking pictures of, but never felt comfortable sitting or lying down in. And each time we all went home, to look at the corners and spaces that used to hold our sleeping or sitting bodies, we’d see our shadows and indentations replaced with more stuff. Rick rack. Books. Plushie toys. Boxes of jewelry. Framed and unframed pictures. Tupperware. Clothes. And Mama would get tears in her eyes when we would decide to spend the weekend at a hotel instead of with her at the house and her stuff. And we visited the house less and less, asking to meet at restaurants and parks for our reunions and get-togethers. Until the day she died in the house all alone, surrounded by stuff. We sold the house for less than what she paid for it, to a neighbor down the street, who demolished the whole thing, burned the remains, then centered the empty lot with a trailer for his daughter.