For the last week I have been working on turning an old bedroom into a space for all my stuff. I’m calling it the music room because that’s where my guitars will live, but it’s really a kind of museum to all the stuff that reminds me of my journey on this earth.

I have stuff from the old barn at home that speaks to me of all the times I worked the cows with my dad. I was always weary of the mama cows bellowing around me as I put the nose clamp on a calf. Dad would castrate the young bulls. I gave them a blackleg shot in the meat of the neck and punched a tag into the left ear.

Every now and then we’d dehorn the cows that needed it. We’d run them through the pinch gate. I’d pull the rope that closed the lever that held their head still. Dad showed me how to use the cutter, and we’d lop off the horns. The cutter is hanging on my wall.

Last year, Marion and I were junk shopping. I can’t remember where, but we were walking around the outside of a building where they had tons of old farm tools leaning against the outside wall. I always look but seldom buy. I’ve got enough of that kind of stuff.

I saw a dehorner hanging on a nail. I looked at the tag. It read, “Vintage Tree Pruner.”

“Look at this,” I said to Marion. “They’ve got it labeled wrong.”

“You should tell them.” she said.

I don’t like making a fuss. We kept shopping. But before we left, I told the lady at the counter about the tag. She went to look at it with me and thanked me for letting her know.

“A lot of times we don’t know what this stuff is when it comes in here. I appreciate you telling me.”

I’ve got a couple of things in my new room that belonged to my granddaddy, Paul Kimbel Chappell. A man I never knew but about whom I heard a lot of stories. He farmed in the growing season, ran a sawmill in the winter, and for years drove a local school bus for the town of Hampton. He was a few months shy of being 65 when he passed away in 1951.

Other than two faded black and white pictures and a handful of tall tales, these two items are all I have of his. I have a leather mule harness and a set of hames he used when he was planting cotton on the farm. I also have his 12 gauge, hammerless double-barrel shotgun from 1917, made by the Ithaca Gun Company of Ithaca, NY.

By rights, that gun should have perished in the fire when the house burned in 1953. D’Daddy was gone by then. Mom and Dad were living there at that time. They lost everything in that fire. All their belongings. All the pictures. All the guns.

The only reason this 12 gauge survived is that Dad had loaned it to a buddy of his who had not returned it. Normally, I’m a little impatient with folks who borrow stuff and don’t bring it back, but this is one occasion where I’m glad that he kept it. It still shoots in case you’re wondering.

I like this room. I guess us old guys like to “remember when” as much as we like to live today. Now that it’s done and my stuff is on display, I easily find myself sitting and looking and remembering the days I lived so long ago.

I’ve got some of my old BSA stuff on the wall. My days at Camp Thunder and all the overnight trips to Glen Mitchell’s lake. Up on a shelf I’ve got the pecan cracker that my mama used. Over the years she must have cracked open a hundred gallons of pecans one at a time with that thing. I’ve got the staple gun that Dad and I used to put up new screen on the back porch. Place the stapler against the screen, make a fist, and strike it with the ball of your fist.

On the wall next to the gun rack I have a pencil drawing by Joseph Vick. This piece depicts a father and son wearing old hunting jackets. A barn in the background. An old, barbed wire fence. Four Beagles in hot pursuit of a cottontail headed for the brush beyond the fence. The father is pointing for his son as if to say, “You head that’a way.”

I can’t tell you how many old fence lines and hedge rows along corn fields Dad and I must have walked together. Listening to the dogs. Trying to anticipate where the rabbit might run out across a field road. Trying to get off a shot before he got to the thicket on the other side. I can feel the weight of my hunting jacket filled with rabbits in the back pouch.

My daughter and her family came for supper last night, and we were looking at all my stuff. They wanted to see the new room and what I’d done with it. I’m not sure if they were impressed or not. I mean, they liked the room. They thought it was nice. But I’m guessing that to them, it was just a bunch of old stuff.

Which is what happens to a man’s stuff. It gets old. It loses its meaning to the generation that follows. They don’t recognize a wire stretcher from a dehorner. There’s no memory for them. No connection. No story to be told. They look at a pair of nose clamps, and they can’t hear a calf bleating. They see a shotgun and they can’t smell the aroma of a spent shell.

I told my daughter, “You know…90 percent of the stuff in my attic belongs to you three kids and almost half of it is yours.”

When kids grow up and leave home, they tend to leave behind some of their stuff. Stuffed animals. Barbie dolls. Boxes of old photos. Posters that used to hang on bedroom walls. Old sleeping bags. Boxes of old shoes, and roller skates, and toys that haven’t been touched in years.

“I know,” she says. “I need to get up there and throw away the stuff I don’t want anymore.”

I haven’t thrown it away. Not without asking, because I remember my mama threw away some of my stuff after I moved out and got married. I never forgave her for tossing my record albums.

“Well.” I told her, “One of these days you’re gonna have to go through my stuff. I’ll just apologize now.”

Sometimes when Marion and I talk about her moving down here with me, she’ll say something like, “I can’t do it. You don’t have room for all my stuff.”

And she may be right, but I don’t keep everything. I would clean out and throw out when necessary.

For the time being, if I do have too much stuff…so what? It ain’t hurting nothing.

And even though it’s only stuff…

It’s my stuff.