My dad hoarded nuts and bolts and such. He said that if he got rid of any of it, the one he got rid of would be just the one he needed for the job. He would pick up jars of bolts and the like at garage sales, just in case.
My mother loved nick-nacks.
Me? Boxes. No, I don’t love them. But like my dad, I need them. What I hate most of all is needing to ship a bunch of stuff and not having the right sized box for the job. So I collect boxes and recycle them, for the most part, though I had boxes I had bought years and years ago that I never used, and finally discovered them stored away and used them all up. They were perfect for my small bears so I went to Walmart to find some more in that size and they didn’t have any.
My Santa Sleigh
However, today is trash day, and I finally made a huge concession and got rid of tons of boxes that are too big to ship anything in, too heavy, and just plain not useable. Unlike hoarders that can’t part with their treasured possessions, I felt better getting rid of some of the clutter. And no, it’s not in huge piles in a room. They’re tucked away in an unusable space for much of anything else.
I will say that I took delight in not only cleaning out the storage space, but while I was hauling out the boxes, I witnessed the glorious stars, half moon, and the pink glow of the sunrise. What could have been nicer?
I read a romance about a woman who hoarded Christmas decorations–she collected broken ornaments even. She didn’t even have hardly any walk space to move around. She had boxes and boxes of ornaments, but she didn’t even have her Christmas decorations out to look at.
Then I was watching a cop show and they had discovered a house where three men were evicted, all of whom were cat hoarders. They had 50 cats in the house, some living in the walls! So between the cop and the humane society, they had to round up all the cats, and you can imagine how badly it smelled in that house.
When I was at Fort Hood, Texas, there was a case of a service member being deployed and his wife had to be evicted from base housing because she had 10 dogs in the house, and it was a total, filthy mess.
And when we lived in Florida, the woman who owned the stud dog (poodle) that we used with our female, had maybe 60 dogs. Now, except for the yipping, no one would ever know that she had tons of dogs in the house. They were all tiny toys, and most looked like puppies. She also had lots of puppies. She didn’t keep them in a kennel, and she was really fastidious. I went into a house once, looking to buy, and the owners had kept 3 large dogs in one bedroom, and it smelled of dog. The breeder’s home didn’t. And her dogs were well loved, not like puppy mills. However, she wasn’t allowed to have that many dogs in the development. One day, her helper let all of the tiny toy poodles out into the backyard at the same time, and a police boat dropped by on the canal and the policemen thought all the puppies were so adorable. LOL If he had only known.
So she was a hoarder of tiny toy poodles.
Confession time! Do you hoard anything? Anything at all?
I think I’m hoarding manuscripts. I need to finish them up so I can send them off and start on new ones. Have a lovely VERY cold day!
Terry
“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”
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