The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down here in the soggy trailers of the South End we got plenty of folks who find it impossible to throw out anything. We call them Hoarders. Cars sit strangled by blackberry vines out back, garage is full of old parts rusting slowly, closets are jammed with clothes that haven’t been worn in years, sheds are piled high with lumber being eaten by powder beetles. You ask them why they keep that crap and they’ll give you the fish face like you were a complete idiot and tell you they might need that lawnmower that stopped running a decade ago for parts. The lumber they might build another shed with … you know, to store more crap.

Believe me, I’m not casting the first stone. I got way too many sheds myself filled with stuff from 30 or 40 years ago when money was tight and all those plumbing and electrical left-overs were kept ‘just in case’. Just in case comes along about as often as sunshine in November down here. Truth is, we’re too lazy to haul it to the dump. Although, some of us are serious and serial Hoarders. I have a buddy who has tunnels in his shack to navigate between the kitchen and bedroom and bathroom. He lives like an ant, burrowed into the ground. His place is a Black Hole, the gravitational pull sucking everything in, allowing nothing out.

We recently moved my old man from his house in Wisconsin to an apartment at the assisted living joint down the road, a downsizing that required tossing half his stuff. Considering that we moved him from Georgia over 15 years earlier and tried to downsize Mom and him then, encountering nothing but resistance, we told them we’d be back in 6 months with a U-Haul so they needed to do it themselves, no ifs ands or buts. We ended up needing two giant U-Haul trucks to move them. Most of what we moved was worthless junk. So years later we still had that worthless junk to sort through, toss, take to Goodwill or find someone to take the stuff. It took us nearly a week. Then a month later we had to move him again to a less independent apartment. Took us four days. And a month ago we moved him again into the nursing unit. Three days. Same drill, same junk.

Believe me, you do that for your parents, you’ll take an unjaundiced eye to your own closets and sheds once you come home. I took three large loads of clothes I hadn’t worn in years to the thrift stores. The dump loads barely make a dent, but it’s a start. Someone offered me a very nice cabinet the other day, something a few years back I would have grabbed, but not now. No more stuff! It’s the wrong direction now. It’s time to let go of these things. I don’t want to live in an ant farm when I’m decrepit. And I don’t have kids to clean out the debris of a lifetime.

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