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I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn. ~~Louis L'Amour
Are you a hoarder of more negative thoughts or positive ones? Whichever ones you hoard, grow into trees and then forests. ~~John Assaraf
At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived. ~~Nicole Krauss
I hoard books. Books feel like home! ~~Avijeet Das
The more space they, hoarders, have available, the more space they fill. Perhaps this is actually the goal--to fill space. ~~ Randy O. Frost, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
My trouble is I always try to save everything: old clocks and calendars, expired words buried
in open graves. But hoarded grains of sand keep shifting as rivers redefine boundaries and seasons. ~~Naomi Long Madgett, Exits and Entrances
The problem with collecting other people's junk is you just don't know what to do with it when you don't want it anymore. You feel bad about throwing it to the curb. It's too much trouble to sell. So you keep it around, knowing if you can't redeem it, exactly, you've at least rescued it. Somewhat. ~~Lisa Samson, A Thing of Beauty
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When one of my friends passed away, I inherited two of her close friends. One lives just down the road from me. She is a brilliant woman, was a championship rider, wrote for various horse magazines, is musically gifted, who lives alone at almost 91 and . . . is a hoarder.
After several years of developing a friendship, she's finally 'let me in.' Into her home. She trusts us. She trusts that my husband and I won't steal any of her 'things.'
Her home is a myriad of narrow pathways where the paths have not been filled with yet more stuff. Books galore. Overflowing bookshelves, piled in avalanche-worthy stacks on the floor or nearby tables. Boxes of papers dating back years. Catalogs. Pictures. Postcards. Bags of clothes she wore as a child, out in the barn, that she wants to make a quilt of. An English saddle is tossed on the pile that is 4/5th of her living room. (Except for the very narrow pathways.) Ribbons upon ribbons upon ribbons--from both state and county fairs, over eighty-plus years--all of them blue or grand champions. Kitchen cabinets are overflowing. Kitchen counters are solid 'stuff.' There's a decent path to her husband's chair because she loves to sit in. She sleeps in the 'spare' bedroom because she hasn't been in 'their' room since the day she closed the door to it after he passed away fifteen or twenty years back.
There's a piano buried under books, sheet music, and whatnots in the front room. Kind of hard to tell, as there are no longer any paths into there at all. Her kitchen table is buried with yet more stuff, and behind and under the piles are photographs of family. Boxes upon boxes of more photos, each clearly handled with some regularity, and each one is known and remembered. Fondly. This was my great-great-great-grandmother's favorite chair. This was my great-great-grandfather's hat. This was my mother's favorite dish, bowl, and teapot. This was her great aunt someone or others' favorite dresser, or candlestick, or thing-a-ma-bob.
The piles and piles walling her in are exactly that--walls. Wall of the familiar. Walls of comfort. Walls keep her safe. Each item is a story or three. Each item is a memory. She is preserving five generations of her family, who (those who are left) neither care about nor even know of, the vast majority of said people. In her mind, she is the caretaker of their lives, stories, attributes, and histories.
Sure, at first, it is a dangerous disaster, awaiting a catastrophe. And it is a mess. Organized in her mind, but still a mess. Somehow, very carefully, I need to convince her that some of it needs to go elsewhere. The keepers need to be on walls, in display cases, or donated to a museum. If she should die, her family will come in, hire a humongous dumpster, and throw 95% of it out, unlooked at, unremarked upon, and uncared about. I get that. Not everyone could/would care about the hundred and fifty-year-old chairs my husband brought home to fix for her. Probably most wouldn't care about the century-old desks that are scattered about somewhere underneath the piles.
I get that too.
When we left there today, the truck was filled with 'to be fixed' chairs, a couple of bags of laundry (her washer gave up the ghost), and food she says she'll never eat. Hubby will fix the washer, replace the furnace filter that was not even the right size, trim back some of the trees, check what's wrong with the oven, and a zillion other 'chores' that need doing and that she can't do. I will attempt to help her sort out the 'necessary' things to keep, from the 'this really needs to go away' stuff. The outdates needs pitching. The no longer legible needs to go away.
Thing is--every single object has a story she needs to tell someone, anyone, probably me. Not a short story, and usually, not just one story, but several. She has gathered these objects like friends and real family. They all really 'mean' something to her.
So, I'm thinking. Distill the stories. Poems are formulating from just the fifty or so stories I heard today. Maybe her family might care about some of the stories, if not the stuff those stories are attached to. Maybe we can winnow down the walls a little bit and yet have her still feel safe. Because, when it comes down to it, are we not all a compendium of the stories that make us who we are? Are not these stories our personal and important histories?
It got us thinking, on our way home, that we aren't so very different from her. Not as much stuff, perhaps (thank goodness), but still, repositories of our family history? Don't our histories deserve to be remembered? Doesn't hers?
Which leads me to thinking about the folks I know, interact with, or are friends with here at WDC. Maybe we don't all need to write memoirs. But perhaps, instead, a poetic retelling of each of our family stories. One piece of history at a time. The old butter churn out in the barn was how they made butter when she was a child in the mid-30s until nigh on to the 60s. The gnawed on stall, fifth down on the left, was where the horse named 'The General' lived his entire life. The Michigan State cross country and dressage champion gnawed that door to his stall. Those cabinets, hand-made out of bird's eye maple, in the kitchen. How many celebrations, anniversaries, and holidays have they been wrapped around the family sitting at that old table that had six, SIX leaves for when EVERYone was there?
Don't we too have these types of stories that need to be, should be preserved? We won't live forever. But the stories absolutely should!
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Poetry: January 14, 2026 Issue [#13550]
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