Tennessee Williams
These days, I have trouble dragging myself out of bed in the morning. The house is haunting me. Permit me to explain. I don’t hoard. I do, however, have loved ones who do. Yesterday, Tech Support Guy was heard to say: “I hate to get rid of them. Somebody could really use them.” His comment slipped out when we were cleaning out the back room and I suggested he toss a carton of old computer manuals (Commadore 64? Really?) and electric cord adapters to prehistoric cell phones. This is exactly what hoarders say on that TV program about hoarding. I’ve heard them.
Alas, we weren’t cleaning the room to make it into an actual inhabitable space.
We have to make more room to store more progeny stuff that progeny hoards. Is there a disease called second-hand hoarding? If so, I’m a sufferer. I hate living in a mess, especially watching it slowly accrete on tables and other flat surfaces, like chairs and couches. The back room was stuffed to the doorway. Now there is room - if not to actually swing a cat – at least to fit both of us in the room at the same time. Me and the cat, that is, not me and another human being. I have no doubt that somebody could really use this stuff for purposes other than providing a three-dimensional play space for curious cats. Does that make me a hoarder too? Hoarding is contageous?
So, next week it’s driving up to Berkeley, hauling minor furniture and more cartons of books than you could shake a dirty dust mop at down four flights of stairs and into a Rider truck that the person who loses the coin-toss will drive back to SoCal; unloading the truck, thereby once again blocking the closet filled with my dress-for-success clothing I no longer wear, and scattering a box of moth balls in before closing the door for another six months. Meanwhile, I’ll just try to stay on the hot tin roof. At least there’s plenty of room up there.
1 comment:
I, too, hate to be surrounded by mess. But, since I now live alone, I have no one else to blame for the accretions. Oh, there is some leftover progeny stuff, of course, and plenty of leftover late spouse stuff. But there is no reason I can't sort through and dispose of much of that ... except for my own laziness. So, I consider it a major victory that Purple Heart took off 5 large boxes of books recently (including G's college texts) and that a neighbor wheeled off my unused grill. Not much progress, perhaps, but at least a bit. What a shame that I can't see any difference. :-(
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