I like the food at camp

I think we’re all coming to grips with a basic fact.

Nobody’s going to want our stuff when we’re dead.

We all spend a lifetime collecting real treasures (Honest, that’s a limited-edition ceramic of a Garden Gnome with a Handlebar Mustache!), tools for all occasions (Most folks don’t know what a ball peen hammer is used for. How about you?), and kitchen utensils (Woah! You don’t use that spatula for eggs! That’s the meringue spatula!).

We’re also good at gathering guilt. (You see that Dutch Oven? Your great-grandmother, who died in the same room she was born, passed that on to me with her dying breath. You’ll want to take good care of it when I’m gone so you can pass it on to your grandchildren.).

Furniture? Same thing. Even if they’re heirlooms. Especially if they’re heirlooms, like that old rocker that your great grandfather made with his own two hands to rock your grandmother to sleep when she was an infant.

Here’s a secret. They’re not going to want all that stuff.

Trust me, if you have something they want, they already took it.

Because the next generation is busy gathering stuff of their own. They don’t have any place to put our stuff.

Now one solution that I have heard people use with regards to the problem of stuff accumulating in the home is, “I’m going to die in this house and let my kids deal with it” Trust me. It doesn’t work that way. People get older, realize they can’t take care of things anymore, slip and fall, suddenly they have to sort through all this stuff when they’re absolutely exhausted and infirm.

You may have a workbench loaded with tools – five different kinds of hammers, flat edge and Philips-head screwdrivers, Metric and English measure tape measures. You probably spent five years-worth of your annual salary over the years preparing for any possible contingency.

Doesn’t matter. Start giving your stuff away now.

There’s one exception – it’s that Better Homes and Garden loose leaf recipe book with the red and white crosshatch pattern. Everyone’s going to want it.

Not the recent ones. They teach you how to cook healthy. You want one like mine, a half century old or older, with the loose leaves falling apart, torn pages taped together, food stains all over the good pages because the book was open while we were cooking, because done right cooking is a messy prospect.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time we need to cook healthy. Eat real food, with no ingredients. Just the food. That’s how we live longer.

But the other day my wife Jennie told me she was in the mood for Beef Stroganoff. That’s when I got out the cookbook to make it the right way. With the fat from the drippings after I fried out the marbling (translate: beef fat), instead of trimming it off and cooking it with an olive oil spray. Preparing the mushrooms in butter instead of microwaving them so no oil is added. Using real sour cream instead of lite or no-fat.

These are the real recipes you use on the days you splurge.

So, give away everything but that cookbook. And if an aunt dies swoop in to get her copy, or haunt estate sales to buy another, so you’ll have one for every kid when you die.

You’ll thank me.

Okay, maybe you won’t thank me because you’ll be dead, but your kids and grandkids will thank me that they got the cookbook instead of a ball peen hammer.