Hoardeology

They’ve found another one. It’s been all over the news. They keep showing clips of her standing in front of what seems to be an ordinary suburban home, but when the front door opens, her awful secret is revealed. This sweet, innocent-looking old biddie hasn’t seen fit to throw anything out since the Nixon administration. She’s a hoarder and her grown-up children have ratted her out.

It’s a disease, they say on the morning news, on CNN, on CNBC – a disease that creates chaos for those around the hoarder. How did her life get so out of control? To find out, I’m told, tune into Oprah Winfrey later today. These news spots about hoarders used to be a wake-up call to me and I’d spend the next several days trying to unearth my office from years worth of old manuscripts, bills, Christmas wrapping paper, empty hampster cages, sports bras, Easter baskets, dog bones, waffle irons, saddle pads, and magazines. Oh, and catalogs. Hundreds and hundreds of catalogs. Now, I’m so far gone that when I see a fellow hoarder being carted off, my eyes dart from side to side and my heart races. Is that a car I hear pulling up outside? A news van? Oprah’s limousine? I envision myself being led outside to a waiting team of behavioral psychologists, while men in hazmat suits and gas masks bravely enter my home.

I’m really not as bad as the people who end up on Oprah, but I’m getting there. I have children and sometimes they have friends over. Sometimes these friends have parents who pick them up and stop in to chat. I can’t bear the shame of a filthy home so I do what any sensible person would do. When I learn that somebody is about to arrive at my house, I run around grabbing newspapers off the floors, cable bills out of the sink, dog bones off the sofa, socks and sports bras off the kitchen table, etc., and I toss them into the only downstairs room with a door – my office. Then I close the door. When the person arrives, they see a relatively tidy home. I’ll sort out my office later, I tell myself.

I have sought help. I’ve watched the Oprah episodes, I’ve even watched home-improvement shows devoted to cleaning your home and organizing your life, but the extent to which they try to simplify the whole problem is absurd. The solution, according to the experts, is to throw stuff out. Throw out all the catalogs, more are coming, said some house-organizing fanatic on one of these shows. Right, I think, and never find that set of barbecue tools with the industrial-sized tongs I saw in one of them. I know it was a 2006 catalog but I’m not sure if it was Hammacher Schlemmer or the one with all the gardening stuff. I must have those tongs! I’ll never find them if I throw away the old catalogs.

In two months, my daughter will be getting her driver’s license and in order to do so, she will need to show her birth certificate. Her birth certificate is in the office … someplace, and she’s been pestering me about finding it. So, after watching the morning news and processing the shame-by-association, I decided to just get it over with. I would clean the office. Now, five hours later, although I am not even halfway through, there are five contractor sized garbage bags filled with junk in my front hall, and I have learned the following:

A) I have ADD
B) The accumulated stuff was/is crazily organized by stratum. It’s like an archeological dig. The top layer was all stuff from this month, the next layer last month, dating back to the turn of this century. It occurred to me that I should leave everything just as it is. When I want to find the title for our pick-up truck, for example, I need only to figure out what month and year we bought it, and then I can instantly thumb through the pile until I reach that date, and there it will be.
C) I have really bad ADD.