Giving the Collyer Brothers a Run for Their Money
My mother, alone for the first time in her life, is incapable of throwing anything away. She lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a senior complex, the same one she lived in with my father. One of my sisters had to sneak in after he died five years ago to cart away his sickroom supplies, his clothing, and about four hundred boxes of miscellaneous junk, otherwise it would still be there.
If you’ve ever seen the popular A & E television show Hoarders, then you know hoarding can cause serious stress in families.
The International OCD Foundation has a website that offers insight into this psychological problem and tools for loved ones to utilize. Of course most hoarders don’t think of themselves as having a problem. They might describe themselves simply as collectors or packrats.
“Mom, do you really need more Christmas ornaments?” we ask, as she shows us her latest finds.
There is no room for a Christmas tree anywhere, so what’s the point? She does however have 14 bamboo plants in brightly colored ceramic pots, taking up all the space on her miniscule kitchen counter. They were half price at the Dollar Store, and it was senior citizens discount day so she got another twenty percent off. She took all they had, all fourteen. “Bamboo plants are supposed to bring you good luck,” she said to me, as if this made perfect sense.
“I just couldn’t pass them up,” she’d say, about the Christmas ornaments. They were probably stuck in a moldy cardboard box on a corner table of the Goodwill store, dusty and forgotten.
She would have negotiated with the poor clerk to give her half price because of a hairline crack in one of them. She also couldn’t pass up the 82 skeins of yarn in discontinued colors that “they were practically giving away” at a closeout sale one day at the Yarn Mart. My sisters and I could donate all the scarves she’s knitted us to the women of Iceland and still have some left over for Norway.
The scariest thing is that the International OCD Foundation website also states that hoarding runs in families. But I need all those shoes.
Really, I do.
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