Re: The Hoarder Diaries

On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Maida 'Mac' Cain <maida.mac@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am back in what some of us local kids call "Drama Town", going
> through Mom's things.
>
> When I say my mother was a hoarder, I wasn't joking. Reading the cases
> in the book Stuff was like seeing multiple different facets of Mom.
> Although she didn't collect the stereotypical newspapers and
> magazines, she saved quite a bit of trash.
>
> Because she was on Social Security almost 20 years, she didn't buy new
> things, but she had a ridiculous number of yard sale "finds". It
> didn't help that she had really rather...tacky tastes. Did she really
> need two gold-painted ceramic hula girls?
>
> Right now, I'm going through stuff from my boys. It's kind of sad,
> realizing that my mother saved every toy, even the broken ones, that
> they brought here or she bought them. It's like she expected them to
> be as dear to them as they were to her. Even my budding hoarder, Kie,
> won't touch most of these things and has asked me to not bring them
> home.
>
> I loved finding all the family photos, going back 100 years or more.
> Memorabilia from my grandma, who died when I was 10, made me cry. My
> great-grandmother's taste was rather like my mother's, but it's still
> been neat history to talk over with my elder aunt. However, I could do
> without all the tchotkes and plain crap. Also, all the "true crime",
> rapey old school romances, and sucky thrillers are not quite my taste
> in books. :p
>
> It feels like all I have been doing is going through her house for the
> past two months, but I've only been up here once in a while. I can
> finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and it isn't a train.
> You may get more stories, though, as I will be getting ready for a
> yard sale in a couple weeks. :p

--
Maida 'Mac/Lys' Cain

"I think maybe we started to forget when we stopped looking up.
Instead of remembering there was a world of sky up there above our
heads, we'd sit on the ground and look at our feet."
- Jack Daw in Charles de Lint's Someplace to be Flying