Hoarding--TV and Reality

Roloffs out, hoarders in. Yes, with the country dwarves on sabbatical, Fio is entertaining herself with a TV show called Hoarders on Monday nights. It features three different hoarding situations per episode, switching around for variety, suspense, and follow-up.

When Fio says "hoarding," she means obsessive/compulsive to the extreme: houses piled so full of things--JUNK--that their residents navigate by increasingly narrow paths, and some rooms are completely closed off. The the said residents can't bring themselves to let go of anything.

Talk about unsightly, smelly, dirty, and unsanitary!

Fio's seen a little of this sort of thing first-hand. Husband's late sister had the pathway thing going, although she did keep everything on the side clean and in neat stacks. His mother had the inclination, but kept it under control, being more of a collector. His aunt, though, was a hoarder.

Fio visited Aunt and her husband in their small duplex once and was goggle-eyed at the piles of stuff sitting around. Being Fio, she wanted to help remedy the situation so she volunteered to visit Aunt later in the week and help her with some of the boxes of crafts projects she had piled up on the kitchen counter. Fio's idea was to paint and weave and whatever so the kits could then be tossed. But when she returned to Aunt's house, that good woman greeted her with the news that she had gone out and bought even more crafts projects for them to work on together. Fio spent the whole afternoon just paring Aunt's inventory down to its original stack.

It was Aunt's own private midden and she wanted to keep it that way.