What would you take with you if your home needed sudden repairs and you weren’t sure how long they would take? That’s exactly the situation Lara Starr found herself in in June 2021, when a tree suddenly fell on her rented home, where she’d been living for 15 years.
Starr didn’t know at the time that the repairs would ultimately take two years, so she did her best to take what she thought she’d need for several months, living out of two suitcases. Find out how Starr made her temporary stays feel like a version of home, whether at a corporate hotel and during house sits and sublets, thanks to yard sales and Buy Nothing groups, which sentimental items she left behind, what it felt like to be reunited with her belongings, and how the experience has made her look at her possessions in a new light.
Click on “Transcript” on the top right to read an auto-generated transcript of this episode.
About our guest:
Lara Starr is a publicist, Substacker, Charm School Principal, sometime cookbook author, former radio producer, low-key activist, and semi-pro thrift shopper. You can learn more at larastarr.com, and follow her antics on Substack, It’s Kind of Long Story…
Instagram: @larastarr
Finders and Keepers is hosted by Rachel Kramer Bussel and is a production of Open Secrets Magazine. Thank you to Sound Off Network and Dan Schroeder for audio production support. If you like the podcast, we’d greatly appreciate if you’d leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends about it to help us reach new listeners. Want to share your own stuff story, tell us who we should interview next, or share your own most treasured possession? Contact us at findersandkeeperspod@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at speakpipe.com/findersandkeepers
For more about our attachments to our belongings, read the personal essays in the Object-ives and Stuff-ed sections of Open Secrets Magazine at opensecretsmagazine.com, where you can also submit your own essays.
