Nevertheless, for the last several weeks, gazing from the driveway, I've noticed dandelions growing from the gutter on the east side of the house. That can't happen, of course, unless they have lots of soil to grow in. *Sigh* An embarrassment! Those dandelions are mocking my laziness!
So, this afternoon I finally cleaned that east-side gutter (probably the first time in three years). Full to the brim with good soil!
Now, Act II.... In addition to addressing the chaos in the basement....
E. has lost or misplaced her W-2 form. We must find it, and fast, since April 15th is just a few days away, but she's a little hoarder, and it will be a hard task.
Speaking of hoarding, this is an interesting article:
Shortly after trying (and mostly failing) to throw out some of my dad's old stuff, I began hoarding TV shows about hoarders and hoarding. There's something creepily cathartic about watching the extreme attachment some people have to their stuff. Each time I tune in for A&E's "Hoarders" and TLC's "Hoarding: Buried Alive," it sends me into a cleaning frenzy, rifling through my closets and driving big bags of old stuff to Goodwill. But what else can you do when the camera pans over a house filled with boxes and stacks and piles of useless stuff, clothes and papers and old dishes and stuffed animals and costume jewelry, all of it clogging up the hallways and rooms and kitchens until dust starts to accumulate and bad smells rise up from the junk and communities of flies and parasites and bed bugs move in, keeping adult children from ever visiting their parents and forcing one family with small children into a tent in the backyard?
Despite my own hoarding impulses and my reluctance to get rid of my father's things, my immediate response to this madness -- the mountain of stuff that's ruining these people's lives, separating them from each other, complicating simple day-to-day activities, requiring constant hurdling and reshuffling and restacking -- is to scream at the TV screen, "For God's sake, light a match and say goodbye to all of it! Go away for a weekend and hire someone to drag it away! Just get rid of it!"
But soon it becomes obvious that all of that stuff is a reflection of some great loss -- a husband who fell ill with heart cancer and died while awaiting a heart transplant, a fiancé who committed suicide unexpectedly, a lover who died in a car accident – then the difficulty of simply throwing it all out becomes clear. Instead of mourning the loss fully, the hoarder puts off saying goodbye.
And once the dead person's things don't leave the house, neither does anything else. The hoarder is stuck in a holding pattern. Perversely, though, new purchases are made to get the hoarder focused on new possibilities, each new thing representing a new escape fantasy: "We'll bake cookies together, me and the girls, and life will be the way it was." "We'll set up lounge chairs by the pool, and a table, and friends will come by and relax, just as Tom and I always planned we'd do when we retired." "I'll finish knitting this skirt." "I'll read this magazine article about cake decorating." "I'll learn more about Sudoku." The piles of stuff reflect a past that's lost and gone forever, but also hint at a hazy, imagined future that is constructed more from fantasy than from a practical sense of what's possible.
What's missing, for the hoarder, is the present. The present is a house packed with oozing piles of crap. The present is nothing but failure and shame and self-doubt and learned helplessness.
...Of course, Christina's resistance only gets worse when the professional organizer and the psychologist and the army of junk-removers driving big trucks converge on her house. Instead of remembering how much better it would be if her "house just burned down," she starts sorting through bags of trash, item by item, while everyone stands around and waits. It's this part of hoarding shows, when the hoarder in question sighs and wrings her hands and insists that she really does need that old magazine or this little girl's sweater or that box of knitting needles or this bag of 20-year-old shoes, that fills me with such palpable dread. Suddenly I think of the storage bin filled with old size-4 pants under my bed (who am I kidding?), among the dust bunnies. Suddenly I consider all of the sweaters I'll probably never wear again and the books I'll probably never read and the boots I haven't worn since I was 27 and the old rings in my jewelry box that I never liked in the first place.
At this point I inevitably turn off the TV and start rifling through my things, filling up bags with junk that I've held onto because I was feeling sentimental or because it seemed wasteful to give it away when I might need it someday, or my daughter might use it, or I might find some other hoarder to take it off my hands.
Thanks to hoarding shows, I've sloughed off stuff that I've been moving from one residence to another for well over a decade: SyQuest cartridges and old mix tapes and skirts that never fit right and old suitcases I don't use anymore. How could it have taken so long to get rid of such worthless junk? I haven't been accumulating that much new stuff, really, I've just been putting off making a final decision on the stuff that I'd mindlessly packed and unpacked and reshuffled for years without just saying: I don't need this, and I will never need this.
...Then again, our inability to get rid of certain things is sometimes tied to our hesitation to give up on some idea of ourselves: "I might still be a size 4 someday," says the 40-year-old size-8 mother. "I might still train for a marathon following this program in this 1998 issue of Runners' World Magazine, I might still learn something from my old philosophy books from college, I might still break out my old acrylic paints and read all of these back issues of the New Yorker." We all want to feel that our lives are filled with endless possibilities, that we have all the time in the world. Hoarding can be a way of denying that there's an end point to your timeline or boundaries around your opportunities.
But when I watch these hoarders, kvetching over this bag of yarn or that muffin tin, I think about the old black-and-white photographs you sometimes find at flea markets and estate sales, photos of a couple smiling on their couch, or of a gathering of women in a backyard, holding a miserable-looking baby, or of a girl sitting on a swing, a dog wandering through the grass nearby. These are someone else's memories that were packed away in boxes, in an attic or a basement, and when that person died, no one wanted them. No kids, no sisters, no spouse, no second cousins showed up and dragged these photographs away -- they were left in a pile somewhere, and now here they are, being sorted through by total strangers. How much stuff will I force my kids to sort through? How much of it will immediately be identified as worthless? How much of my stuff might end up like this, drifting through the hands of strangers? When you think about your stuff that way, 90 percent of it suddenly begs to be boxed up and driven to Goodwill immediately.
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