#78 – “Never throw anything away. You never know when you might need it.”
Despite the above mom-maxim, she wasn’t a hoarder. I am sure of this because we could walk through our house without standing on garbage and we slept in beds. Until I watched a few episodes of the TV series Hoarders I thought that a hoarder was someone (mom) who kept 3 rubber bands on their wrist, a small pile of twisty ties in a drawer, 10 empty (clean) milk jugs on the back porch, and a 2-foot pile of Dallas Morning News and New York Times on the bedroom floor. Apparently mom was an amateur hoarder.
As it turns out, my first real experience with hoarding was when a friend told me about a house they were buying that was so full of stuff that when they went to look at the house they could barely walk through it. She said that there were only small trails throughout the house. I couldn’t quite picture what she was describing and thought that she must surely be exaggerating. Then I, along with millions of other mesmerized Americans, watched Hoarders. It is not just the stunning visual of homes stacked to the ceiling with stuff, and people living in unbelievably unlivable conditions that make it all so intriguing, but also the impact on the people and families involved: isolation, shame, anger, fear, sorrow, families torn apart by a seemingly uncontrollable need to keep things. Click on Read More Below...
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