pickers down under

American Pickers may be all the rage back home, but it isn’t any different on this side of the world. Last weekend we rode our bikes up the street we used to live on, and we noticed piles of discarded furniture and other bulky items lining the sidewalks. As we chugged up the great hill to a near halt, a small pickup truck (or ute as they’re called here) passed us, pulled over, and a man and his young son popped out. In the back they already had assorted fans and pieces of wood furniture. They grabbed a few more items, hopped back in the ute, and drove on.

I see no evidence that the city has arranged to pick up the remains during a “Fall Clean up,” and now it’s all been thoroughly rain soaked as it continues to meld into the curb.

my valentine

Yesterday morning I checked into my office to find the most wonderful and coincidental Valentine’s gift from D.. Eight boxes of books arrived in my office from the U.S.     Love.

There are another seven that are MIA and probably fifteen more that need to be sent from home. Unpacking the boxes felt like Christmas, my birthday, the fourth of July… you get the idea. Among the loot were a few much needed texts, some French fiction I haven’t touched in ages but love to have on my shelves, and then the random: a pattern for a crocheted afghan that I’ve started three times and never finished.

D. has said if we move again, the books are not coming with me. I feel like whining, “But I neeeeeeed them for work!” Of course, there is that big building on campus called a …. library.

the goodness of stuff

D. just got back from the States with five suitcases: a veritable treasure trove of stuff. I am amazed at the things he picked up and brought back – everything from a bike repair kit to some wooden hangers, full tool sets and so on. Most of it is linens and cooking supplies; all of it is wonderful. This stack of worthless looking tins almost made me well up (granted I’m hormonal at the moment and got misty eyed at Madonna’s Super Bowl performance). The bottom cake pan has been in my life as long as I remember. It may have come from a grandparent, but I specifically remember my mother baking with it when I was little. It made my heart happy to see it here in Australia even though it had completely slipped my memory until today.

to confront or not to confront

After my post the other day about possibly talking to my parents about their hoarding problem, I emailed my brother to see if he had thoughts. His response: there is nothing we can do.

Yeah…I don’t think we can say anything or do anything to change what is going on.  When I was living over there years ago, I tried to clean up, but, it didn’t really do much good.  I know K. is frustrated with it and has probably just given up.  My thinking is eventually something will happen so that I can go and straighten things out…not sure when or what will happen.  Not much I can do either…I might as well be 10000 miles away too.

There’s the long and short of it. We both feel defeated but understand it is their problem. I just don’t know if they are aware it is a problem.

widespread problem

I have a spreading problem. D. has been gone for nearly a week for work. I noticed two days ago that with no one to keep my clutter in check, it started to snake its way down the kitchen counter. It has even spread to my office, both home and at work. Fortunately D. will be back soon and I will slay back the clutter demons to prepare for his arrival.

 

my future hoard?

Last Tuesday, Sidney at Milbetweenus.com posted the story of Greg’s journey through his parents’ hoard. It’s a compelling and tragic read that helped me understand why some COHs have encouraged me to say something now to my parents instead of waiting until they’re found clinging to life (or worse) under the weight of their hoard.

the "office"

When I consider the mass of things my parents have accumulated in their lifetimes, I prefer to just never look back. What’s really sad about it in retrospect is that while I lived in that house for the 2 years or so while I finished high school, I had mostly happy moments. But when I think about the house in the state I last saw it, all my memories are dampened. All I see now is the filth, shut off rooms, broken gutters, cracked doorsteps, and disarray. This when I know that they had cleaned the house the best they could before we got there. As I’ve said before, my strategy has been to look away and go away while letting them live their lives.

I teared up, though, reading Greg’s story, because I know this is the position my brother shares. He has long been saying he will take a leave from work when the time comes and he will go through the house, with or without family help. He feels he needs to pay proper respect to what has been kept, and he shares Greg’s desire to see it all before it goes. Just thinking about it makes my chest tighten up, not just with anxiety, but thoughts of the dust mites and mold that trigger my allergies.

It makes me angry with my parents, but still I do nothing. You’ve made your bed, now lie in it (if you can) comes to mind. Maybe I can start by talking to my brother to see if he wants to intervene at any point. Even more appropriate would be to contact my step-brother and sister-in-law who live 45 minutes from the hoarded house and see my parents regularly. But my parents have cleverly cut us off from each other — similar to what they’ve done with their home. Every communication passes through them first and they’ve created a web of information that we either are or are not supposed to know so that when we talk we navigate goat trails. It’s no wonder I left the country when I think of the weight of things that could topple down at any moment.

Enough about me, though. Greg – you’ve done a great and noble thing that I do not have the balls to do for my folks although that would be my dad’s dying wish. Sidney, you’re amazing for being able to support Greg the way you have. It’s hard enough for a COH to understand what their parents have done; I can’t imagine how much more difficult it is for our partners.

collectin’

When I was little girl and my family moved to Montana, my brother and I started spending hours collecting rocks on the  foothill behind our house. We had an old coffee can and our main ambition was to find quartz and smokey quartz crystals to put in it. This entailed scanning the ground while we walked with sharp attention to detail. Any glimmer required some dirt scratching to see what treasure we’d unearthed. My brother also got into panning for gold and tumbling rocks. He was much more committed than I.

Years later, I still find myself staring at the ground for treasures as I walk along. S., now three years old, has inherited the passion distraction. Yesterday we walked D. to the train station so he could catch a flight home to the U.S.. It was raining quite heavily, but S. and I plodded along, hand in hand, scanning the ground for treasures. She picked up little leaves and said, “It’s for my collection.” Or, “I’m collectin’ this for you, Mommy.” So far this week, in addition to numerous interesting leaves and flowers we would never see in Kansas, we’ve seen some possum poo, interesting skinks, and very speedy caterpillars scooting down the hill in the rain.

S. and I glued our collected leaves (but not the poo, bugs or skinks) to a piece of scrap cardboard. We showed it to D. and it went into the recycling bin a few days later. I love seeing beauty in the little things, but need I worry about S’s new fascination with collecting every pretty little flower or seed she finds on the ground? Each one she drops, she shrieks, “Oh! My flower!” and I try to brush it off so she won’t keep thinking about what was lost. In the meantime, yesterday, I told D. I really still wanted to find my umbrella that I last saw in Florida in 2010.

Collecting is a fun activity. I just need to keep working on the letting go part of it.

burn barrel worthy

The place where my HP father lives is about four miles outside of a smallish town, and although they have neighbors around them, it can be classified as in the country. In the backyard near the deer pen there is a burn barrel, which is basically an old rusted oil barrel – the kind you see hobos warming their hands over in grimy movies about New York. (Gawd, I hope that wasn’t an offensive image – at least not any more offensive than the image I’m painting of my parents. A nicer image might be of a steel drum?)

My parents keep their compost, basically feeding vegetable scraps to the deer. They recycle plastic and aluminium, which means hoarding cool whip containers and cans in the garage. They burn, however, the majority of their trash.

One day during university I was visiting my family and sorting through things I had left at their house. I made a pile that I decided to burn. I no longer remember what I burned exactly, since I know I still have boxes of notes and even printed emails that have been condensed but stored over the years. I do remember that I took the opportunity to burn some of my father’s things.

Each time I visited, my step-mother would lament how much these collected things weighed on her. She sometimes joked about getting her own place to live just to have space; but now I know that she, too, contributes to the piles.

If you ask my father politely if you can dispose of his 1980 phonebook from a town in another state, he will shriek, “No. I need that. There are numbers in there that are now unlisted. I use it still.” Instead, I took the stealthy strategy of quickly grabbing a couple of phonebooks from his stack. Not too many that he would notice, and not the oldest one. And oops, out they went into the burn barrel along with my things. I couldn’t pray for the flame to burn any faster and kept looking over my shoulder in case he noticed the pages of his beloved phonebook flying up in the air with the smoke. I don’t think he ever found out. At least no one ever mentioned it to me.

I read so many messages from other COHs about the valuable things that are lost in the hoard. Recently there was a story about a purple heart that had gone missing in the mess. I can’t even afford to think about what’s worth keeping in my parents’ house at this point. There probably are some wonderful treasures, valuable ones, in the stacks. Mostly I think there would be nothing more redeeming than watching it all go up in smoke once my parents are gone.

paper-free with a price

Oh Ikea, it’s always all about you. How could we survive without accumulating your gadgets to make our clutter go away? I have to admit, though, that I have a soft spot for organized hoarders. Maybe it’s because my father is on that path with his alphabetized and chronologically ordered crap. Maybe because it’s the kind of hoarder I would aspire to be.

cleaning house

Yesterday over lunch a colleague was lamenting the impending visit of a relative from overseas. She said she was trying desperately to clean the house but it only got dirtier which made her realize she hadn’t properly cleaned in ages. And then she ultimately knew that no matter how clean she got the house, her visitor would not be satisfied.

Today we are cleaning our own house in expectation of dinner guests. Unlike my colleague, I have no trouble cleaning and often invite people just to inspire us to do a thorough clean. It’s a great feeling to me, the day after the party has been cleaned up, to see how shiny the house still is. I wouldn’t say I love to clean and I don’t do a deep clean more than once a month, but it does bring a sense of satisfaction.

On the COH listserv there are often questions about how to clean, how to know when you need to clean, and how to approach it. For those who grew up in serious hoarding conditions, cleaning was not even possible. Even if our parents let us touch their things, it’s too difficult to get at surfaces when you’re busy moving piles from point to point.

In my childhood, however, I only remember an excessively clean house. I know it was clean because my brother and I had extensive chore lists that included scrubbing out the bathtub at least once a week. My dad, or maybe my mother, told a story about a relative who used the white glove test when they came to visit. My father also prided himself on his military background and carried out the same sort of inspections to which he was once subjected.

When my mom left, and then my brother, my dad’s sense of reality started to waiver. It seemed he was constantly yelling at me that we were going to get dysentery from the dishes left on the dish rack after washing. I had to dry them meticulously and immediately or they were sent back into the sink. To this day, I rarely dry the dishes unless I’m in a hurry to put them away.

My father’s hoarding always seemed asynchronous to his germophobia until I read Frost and Steketee’s Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (2011) which gives various examples of hoarders with contamination issues. In all the years of living in a clean house, I do not ever remember my father being the one who cleaned. Perhaps he already had contamination issues that prevented him from cleaning. I wonder if he would explain it if I asked.