The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Clyde stopped by our place yesterday, wanted to know if I wanted some wood flooring. Clyde’s notorious for scrounging lumber — beams, 2×4’s, plywood, chopped off rafters and joists full of nails — he takes it all, he and his partner Fred. They’re true South Enders, no building parts are too unworthy for future projects. No oddly shaped root or burled tree trunk couldn’t be imagined as a trellis or a doorway or a garden gate. Their greenhouse/apartment is a testament to homesteader ingenuity, from the recycled plumbing for a radiant heat floor to the gnarly limbs of a cedar tree that frame a window made from sliding glass door panels. The roof is raftered with bridge beams and salvaged lumber, all covered with earth and plantings, a green ecosystem.

So when Clyde asks if I want some wood flooring, red lights go off and a siren shrieks deep down in my hippocampus. “You don’t want it yourself?” I ask, meaning, what’s wrong with this flooring if you boyz are turning it down? Clyde avows how they don’t need flooring and anyway, it’s all mismatched remnants. Like they don’t have mismatched remnants from one end of their property to the next??? “Use em for furniture,” I advise. “I took my leftovers and made cabinets and bookcases, banjos, hell, it’s hardwood.”

“We’re jammed up,” Clyde says sadly. “Stuff we got now is getting powder post beetles. We couldn’t use it all in the rest of our lifetimes.” Which is true! They’re beyond Scroungers now, heading toward Hoarders. It’s a fine line, I know, and only a packrat like myself who’s scrounged most of his life is qualified to define the slip from Collector to Psychopathology. Clyde, I diagnosed, had stepped back from the Abyss. Enough was finally enough. Clutter was one thing, tunnels to the kitchen and bathroom quite another.

No mas! There comes a time when a sane man knows implicitly to STOP. Before it’s too late. Before madness descends like a dark curtain blotting light and reason.

Today I picked up 10 boxes of hardwood flooring, enough to lift the front end of my truck. No, I don’t really need flooring. But, you never know, right? Now if I can just figure out where to store all this wood until I need it….

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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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