Throughout my life I’ve observed houses and yards that must certainly be occupied by hoarders…I remember going with friends in college to get a sneak peek through the bushes of one such back yard that was wooly with shrubs and trees, where millions and millions of trinkets hung from the branches, were hidden in the brush or piled precariously high on top of older piles of garbage; my friends and I were fascinated by the place. I recall always prefacing for anyone about to see it for the first time, “You will not believe it…you’ll DEFINITELY think it was worth the trip”. It was like peering into a crazy cave, a secret world that no one was supposed to see or know about, a show. I remember hearing that a friend of mine had a mother who was a Hoarder; every hallway and room of their house was completely lined from floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes, with only narrow ”tunnels” between all the cardboard to move around in. My friends squeezed through the halls, single file, and were horrified to think of our friend having to call that his home.
On the other hand, as Scot and I watched this perfectly nice couple, last night, struggling to get rid of their junk and beginning the clean up phase – fully assisted by a team of cleaners – I did think a few times about my own basement, shown here with lime green hampers and baskets of CLEAN, not dirty laundry - one for each child, one for each parent, one for towels, one for sheets and blankets, one for boy socks, one for boy boxers, etc...never put away but picked through as we need stuff because there is simply too much of it to get on top of; mine is an organized mess, certainly not an example of hoarding but clearly a project for optimizing and parting with tons of the items at the bottom of all the piles, to make it easier to find things, easier to visually comprehend, easier for me to emotionally stomach.
I thought of attics or garages I’ve had in the past, closets, certain drawers, the tops of certain counters throughout the house. I believe we all hoard to a degree but we set limits; I can scrounge around through my “pencil drawer” and toss random things into it as I race through my day, a lone thumbtack, a rubberband, a lozenge, someone’s library card, a couple pennies. I tell myself it’s O.K. I don’t even think about it. But if you were to ask me to go through that drawer and make sense of it, I’d put it off for as long as possible. It’s hard to be discriminating about what’s really important to hold onto. So much stuff is flying at us all the time; junk mail that we fear could be important mail, important info and dates from our children’s schools, the millions of THINGS that could be useful at another time, all screaming at us “KEEP ME!”Because I do NOT have a serious hoarding condition, only your average-human kind of "keeping stuff I don't need", I am thankfully able to numb myself to the significance of my stuff - from time to time - and simply toss, toss, toss! Moving is the perfect excuse for this type of cleansing because most of us really want to know what we’re putting the effort into, what are the items that really get to stay in the “keep” pile. I knew I had really dulled my neurotic senses to a workable point when we moved to our current home because I had all five kids at that time, but none of them were babies anymore…which meant that I had to go through their baby stuff. That’s when I was finally able to get rid of their little belly-button stubs that I had saved from their infancies. And not that a baby’s belly button takes up a lot of room, but I was able to get rid of them mentally, which is the exercise that has to happen…for anyone...OCD, or not.
Scrapbooking is a form of hoarding, by the way, but it’s a controlled and elegant version of the same human sentiments. And it’s designed, laid out, displayed like a perfect advertisement for the moments of your life, versus strewn on the ground to be stepped on. I could totally see someone becoming obsessive-compulsive about their scrap-booking though, like freaking out if they had not been careful to hold onto every precious moment. My belly-buttons would have been perfect in a scrap-book but I never took the time to put one together. Instead I have bins, Rubbermaid bins, some labeled, some not, tons of them, with my important stuff that passed the test and was granted entrance to “the next house”…I guess the curious thing for me is where the possibly fine line is when “collecting” or “keeping” in a healthy, sentimental way crosses into “hoarding” and the scary feeling of literally having your soul “emptied out” when you’re challenged to get rid of your garbage for the sake of saving your home or your life.
Blue had a Pork Chop for a while in the back seat of his car, an old slice of Pizza, a million empty cigarette packs, a broken umbrella, a stray shoe. Scot keeps broken phones, broken VCR’s, mostly appliances, but out of sight…in the garage. I keep things that bring a tear to my eye like notes from Santa to the kids, but also WAY too many clothes, lipsticks, things I know will never be used. Toyen “collects” bottles and cans, some of which are beautiful, limited edition pieces of art…while she’ll also allow an empty humdrum pepsi can - which somehow feels like pure garbage to me - to be part of her display; many of these bottles are crammed in between other significant things in her large bookshelf and look less like an artisitc collection than something more quirky. And if she catches me even glancing at the overcrowded and chaotic "display", she glares hard at me with a face that says “Don’t go NEAR them!”. Clearly these are significant in her life.
“I’ll keep it for my grandchildren!” is another classic reason to hold onto every little thing…but for me, I have so much crap to wade through in my own life as a Mom that I’d have to threaten my mother if she started sending us stuff from my past; she’s shared a few things, some books, an item here or there…but honest-to-God, would my kids really cherish all my old things?? How exciting is my erector set from the ‘60’s to a child who really wants an I-Phone??
Anyway, just curious...what have you held onto? Are you able to simply TOSS or are you a sentimental KEEPER? A scrap-booker? A hoarder? (I am guessing not…) All I know is that after watching these Hoarder shows I am feeling a little uneasy about my basement, in particular, my laundry room and I am determined to have it morph into something very different by sometime in September, that’s my goal.
But for now, I’m feeling somehow balanced between my pristine living room (who is LIVING in it?) and the chaos of the basement, as I imagine the average person is.Ruby
No comments:
Post a Comment