Village Life: Too many shoes and shades of pink

By Kate Stockrahm

I have too many shoes.

Well, more honestly: I have too many things, period. Too many shoes, sure, but also too many old coffee mugs, too many mismatched pots and pans and plates and glasses, too many nearly-finished bottles of lotion I actually never liked the smell of anyway, too many sun-faded t-shirts I haven’t worn since I played intramural soccer every Saturday back in Washington, D.C., too many hair accessories and allen wrenches and bottles of slightly different shades of pink nail polish named things like “Ballet Slippers” and “You Make Me Blush.”

Too.

Many.

Things.

I came to terms with this fact while packing all of these items (and many, many others) into dozens of Bankers Boxes, suitcases, and plastic totes late last month – the wholly unsatisfying preparation for an impending move.

And if you’ve ever moved you’ve likely also hit that moment in the packing process where you’re frustrated, tired, and overwhelmed and think simply “I should just burn all of this stuff and start fresh… maybe in Alaska” – but this realization wasn’t that. It was a revelation. 

Until this packing process, somewhere between a pair of silver cowboy boots (for a bachelorette party in Austin last March) and the sixth and seventh bottles of pinkish polish (“Machu Peach-u” and “Mauve It”), I was sure I’d been living rather minimally.

After all, I’d had to.

I’d had to live minimally not only because I wasn’t exactly swimming in money while plopping around high-rent cities throughout my twenties (I mean truly, a $1,600/month studio on the west side of Harlem – before utilities!?) but because having to move nearly once every year meant there wasn’t a lot of time to accrue possessions.

I’d ended up leaving my first place after college because my roommate, Duarte, met his now-wife on their morning Metro commute just a few months after we’d moved in. (It was literally a Hallmark movie situation, how could I be upset when he didn’t want to renew the lease?)

My second place was with great friends who turned out not to be great roommates. At least I’d only had a small bedroom there, so that move consisted of just a few suitcases, my first pair of Toms slides (I have four now), one piece of art, and a mattress.

There was also an apartment near H Street that I shared with an eccentric, messy couple who never stopped fighting; the basement walk-up where my friend left me her last Pop-Tarts package and a sticky note that just said “I like it here” when I moved in the day after her; and the ever-rotating cast of characters (and cats) that called different rooms of 117 R Street home because the lease terms were always unclear.

But now here I was, in late September 2025, holding a discontinued nail polish called “Petal Pink” and a flip-flop without its mate in the living room of my 1920s-era Flint apartment and wondering how I became the kind of person with all this stuff.

And just as I started contemplating how much it would cost me to move to Alaska instead of paying a Carriage Town mortgage, I realized what all of these boxes really meant. 

I’d found home.

Granted, it’s a home where I do have too many shoes and – clearly – shades of pink nail polish. But I have these too-many things because I stayed here, in Flint, in this same apartment, for more years than I’ve ever stayed anywhere else in my adult life.

So while I do need to purge myself of some (or maybe most) of these possessions in my new home in Flint, I think the real takeaway is that it is home.

And I’m so glad to have found it.